Re: Guile support in GNU make

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Paul Smith <address@hidden>
() Sun, 15 Jan 2012 11:12:29 -0500

   > - The ‘#t => t’ distinguishes the symbol t from others, which feels wrong.
   >   I suggest #t => ""; #f => error.

   [desirability of #t => "t" and #f => ""]

Thanks.  Now that i understand the motivation, i think the current
way is fine.  You should move this excellent example into the docs.

   > Oh yeah, i forgot: I think Make vars should not be accessed by a
   > Scheme string, but rather a symbol

   Well, my concern about this is that in GNU make, anyway, we very often
   use constructed variable names.  I would assume that the same would be
   true in Guile procedures, which means it will more be convenient to
   store variable names in strings in Guile (it seems to me) so they can be
   more easily manipulated.  Of course you can always use symbol->string
   etc.

Guile has both ‘string-append’ and ‘symbol-append’ as well as the other
string-manipulation procedures, so the convenience argument is not so
convicing.  But why XOR instead of OR?  It's no big deal to...

   But is this worth it, to require the Guile user to always perform
   this operation when we could do it automatically?

...support either string or symbol argument.  The current implementation,
i.e., ‘(format #f "$(~A)" X)’ will DTRT.  All it needs is documentation.