Re: Guile support in GNU make

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2012-01-15 at 21:11 +0100, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
>    [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.

OK I'll try to find a realistic example to make this more clear.

>    > 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.

Yes that's true.  OK I'll update the documentation.


Thanks!

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