Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH 3/4] Remove ##sys#expand-home-path.

[Felix]

From: Mario Domenech Goulart <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH 3/4] Remove ##sys#expand-home-path.
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:33:49 -0400

> 
> Making robust software in shell scripting languages is hard, and one of
> the reasons it is hard is that shells perform a lot of "convenient"
> operations behind our back.  They may be convenient for interactive use,
> indeed, but for programs they usually imply handling corner cases that
> the programmer ends up forgetting, leading to bugs that are hard to
> reproduce, find and fix.

Nicely spoken. But all that shellish convenience is something that you
use every day without even noticing. You are so used to it that you
don't even realize that it's there. I don't see a reason not to add or
keep some convenience (we are talking abouta high-level language,
after all). So I'd like to keep "~"-expansion, at least for "load",
and probably others like "compile-file". The "$"-expansion is silly
enough to be removed, I fully agree with that. It should also be
clearly documented which operations provide the expansion and which
do not. 

What I like about chicken is that I have the low-level access and
(sometimes) the performance of a systems language with the convenient
and the power of a high-level language, and that is basically the
reason I use it at all. Doing everything in the way that seems to be
implied here by "clean" will make us end up with something like the
SML Basis, which is conceptually bloated and mindblowingly boring at
the same time.


cheers,
felix