Re: syncase merged to master

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I went ahead and merged the syncase branch to master. So syntax-case /
> syntax-rules macros in master will be hygienic with respect to modules
> in addition to lexical bindings.

Cool, thanks.  I still need to go through your response to my
comments, will do that soon.

> If I might rhapsodize a moment: it's fashionable in the Scheme world to
> criticize Guile. There are four major points:
>
>   1) Syncase macros are unhygienic with respect to modules
>   2) Syncase macros not available by default
>   3) Guile is slow (many flavors of this argument)
>   4) Guile doesn't even do unicode
>
> We're fixing all of these. Within the next couple months. We're doing
> great work, and we should be proud.

Yes indeed, and thanks in large part to you.  As far as the criticism
is concerned, though, I'm not sure what's there is totally rational,
so I wouldn't expect that it will go away.

My impression is that Guile is mentioned quite rarely on the general
Scheme lists; when it is mentioned, it is most often as part of a poll
of implementation behaviours.  Guile had a reputation for a while of
not being completely R5RS compliant - which was true, but based on a
very small number of quite corner cases.  We fixed those, and - as
shown by the list above - the criticism has moved on.  In my view the
biggest point since then has been slowness - which was true also,
although in many scenarios unimportant.  And as you say, we're
addressing that.

(I think there may be a sense, in the wider Scheme community, that (i)
Guile has an unfair advantage in terms of usage because of being the
GNU project's scheme, and (ii) that it isn't quite proper because of
being developed by non-academics; and we could also be criticized for
not taking more part in wider discussions.  Perhaps that is part of
the reason why there is always another criticism.)

> #scheme can go to hell.

FWIW, what I care most about is feedback from Guile's existing users
and from people trying it out.  If _they_ are concerned about hygienic
syncase, I'll try to look into that (and then Andy will actually fix
it :-)).
   
Regards,
        Neil