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Making apostrophe, backtick, etc. hygienic?


From: Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer
Subject: Making apostrophe, backtick, etc. hygienic?
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 14:30:29 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux)

This is a bit of a crank idea, but here goes.

Today I wasted some time trying to find the bug in the following piece
of code:

    (define (syntax-car syntax)
      (syntax-case syntax () ((car . cdr) #'car)))

Better error reporting in macro-expansion errors might have made it less
painful, but maybe we can solve the problem itself.

How about making 'foo turn into something like (__quote__ foo), and
similar for `foo, #'foo, etc.?  Where __quote__ is just a synonym to
quote, and the original works too.  Ideal would be a symbol that's not
as noisy (in debug output) but still highly improbable to appear in user
code and be accidentally shadowed.

Maybe it would not be standards-compliant in the strict sense, but I
believe it would be an improvement.

Am I missing any obvious downsides?  Or any subtle ones?

I peeked into Guile's sources to see where one might start implementing
this (read.c, expand.c, psyntax.scm?) but better to ask for some input
since it might be a controversial change, and I'm still a total noob in
Guile's code-base.

Taylan



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