Re: [Chicken-hackers] [CR] Make keywords distinct from symbols

[Ivan Raikov]

I think the historical precedent has been to make  the big sweeping
change and then frantically rush to fix all broken eggs :-)
But in this case it really sounds like it is better to make all
changes to keyword semantics at once, rather  than piecemeal.

-Ivan

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 12:44 PM Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 06, 2019 at 10:30:14PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
> > Some of the defining forms reject keywords now, but there may be some
> > we missed, and by making them completely distinct we fix these problems
> > for good. For the vast majority of the code out there this is an
> > unimportant change. Code which relies on symbol? returning #t for keywords
> > will run into trouble (but is usually easy to fix by adding another cond
> > clause for keyword?, which will happily be backwards compatible to older
> > CHICKENs). There may be other obscure uses of keywords that will fail, but
> > I can't really think of many.
>
> So far nobody has bothered to reply here or on the ticket at all.
> It will be two weeks after next Monday (the 20th).
>
> As our process document at https://wiki.call-cc.org/change-requests
> says that if two weeks pass without comments, it should be assumed nobody
> cares enough or has a problem with the change.
>
> I've heard from Felix on IRC, he said he's worried we're changing too
> much at once in 5.1.  Personally, I think if we make this change in a
> later version it'll be more frustrating for users, because we're already
> changing how keywords behave (no plists, cannot be used as identifiers
> anymore).  Making keywords and symbols distinct types later means we'll
> have two such changes.
>
> To sum up, we could:
>
> 1) Not make this change at all
> 2) Do it anyway in 5.1
> 3) Do it in some later version (but how long do we wait?)
>
> What do the other hackers think?  Please, speak up!
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
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