Re: Need help to understand a macro

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

Josef Wolf <jw@raven.inka.de> writes:

> BTW: While we're at the docs, what I find confusing about guile documentation
> is that it talks extensively about the C bindings, but has not much to say
> about the language itself and how guile differs from the standard (extensions,
> limitations). But maybe I've just not got the big picture yet...

I have some changes pending that may help a bit with that.

For the standards that Guile follows, I think it's pretty faithful, so
there isn't much to say about limitations.  So that just leaves saying
what those standards are, and extensions.

For the former, one of my pending changes for the 2.0 manual has this:

===================
Guile implements Scheme as described in the
Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (usually known as
@acronym{R5RS}), providing clean and general data and control
structures.  Guile goes beyond the rather austere language presented
in @acronym{R5RS}, extending it with a module system, full access to
@acronym{POSIX} system calls, networking support, multiple threads,
dynamic linking, a foreign function call interface, powerful string
processing, and many other features needed for programming in the real
world.

The Scheme community has recently agreed and published R6RS, the
latest installment in the RnRS series.  R6RS significantly expands the
core Scheme language, and standardises many non-core functions that
implementations -- including Guile -- have previously done in
different ways.  Guile has been updated to incorporate some of the
features of R6RS, and to adjust some existing features to conform to
the R6RS specification, but it is by no means a complete R6RS
implementation.

Between R5RS and R6RS, the SRFI process
(@url{http://srfi.schemers.org/}) standardised interfaces for many
practical needs, such as multithreading programming and
multidimensional arrays.  Guile supports many SRFIs, as documented in
detail in @ref{SRFI Support}.

In summary, so far as relationship to the Scheme standards is
concerned, Guile is an R5RS implementation with many extensions, some
of which conform to SRFIs or to the relevant parts of R6RS.
===================

As far as extensions are concerned, I think it is very likely that the
manual isn't always clear about what things are standardized and what
are extensions.  But I'm not sure what to do about it - do you have a
suggestion?  Also, how much does it matter in practice?

Regards,
       Neil