Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!bruce!goanna!ok
From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Non Chez Nous or Repository
Message-ID: <4990@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 18 Mar 91 08:35:52 GMT
References: <4977@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> <1991Mar15.163509.12130@rice.edu> <21900@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 49

In article <21900@yunexus.YorkU.CA>, oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
> In article <1991Mar15.163509.12130@rice.edu> dorai@titan.rice.edu
> (Dorai Sitaram) writes:
> >I'm posting this rather than just emailing Richard since people seem
> >to listen when he talks ;->
Be sure I did receive E-mail.  Not terribly informed E-mail, but vehement.

> and it's likely that his discomfort with
> >Ozan's repository becomes contagious :-<.

> I hope not.

I hope not too.  I think the _idea_ of the repository is excellent,
I think Ozan Yigit deserves heart-felt praise for doing it, and I hope
that it grows.

Nor do I see any objection to having system-specific code in it.
For example, there was some PC-scheme-specific stuff mentioned in this
newsgroup, and it would be good to have stuff like that in the
repository.

My objection was not to having dialect-specific code in the repository,
but to having dialect-specific code which is not LABELLED as dialect-
specific.  SLaTeX was not as it happens the program I had in mind,
though it is rather more Chez-specific than the ones I was thinking of.

Let's briefly consider the question of square brackets.
It is not a trivial matter to hack them with an editor script
(comments, strings, characters, escapes inside symbols if you have them).
That's why I hacked an #ifdef into Elk.
More to the point is that I did this with great trepidation.
Square brackets are not part of Scheme or Common Lisp syntax,
and I have no Chez Scheme manual.  So when I see [eq? x y] in
what is purportedly Scheme code, I genuinely DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.
It was a *guess* that I could replace the square brackets by parentheses,
ONLY a guess.  Square brackets could have been embedded Prolog, or
escapes to an underlying Common Lisp, or syntax for some kind of
evaluated vectors, or ... I've met all _sorts_ of things using square
bracket syntax in the past, that's precisely why they're not in the
standard.

The same applies to all the other extensions.  Maybe I _could_ hack
them IF I KNEW WHAT THEY MEANT.  To someone who _has_ a Chez Scheme
manual as well as the R^3.99RS it may be obvious how to translate
everything.  The point of writing to the standard whenever you can
is that other people may not have the same manuals as you, but they
do have the same standard.
-- 
Seen from an MVS perspective, UNIX and MS-DOS are hard to tell apart.