Re: What's the meaning of the percent sign in variable names

[Luis Felipe <luis.felipe.la@protonmail.com>]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, April 23, 2021 2:49 PM, Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> wrote:

> Am Freitag, den 23.04.2021, 14:22 +0000 schrieb Luis Felipe:
>
> > Hi,
> > Are all these constants (%base-packages, for example)? Is this a Guix
> > convention or does it come from Guile? Although looking at Guile's
> > Variable index I see many constants in uppercase, and also some
> > variables prefixed with the percent sign, while Guix' Programming
> > index doesn't seem to list any uppercase names.
>
> The tendency to prepend variables with % certainly comes from Guile or
> more generally Scheme. The upper case constants in Guile likely come
> from C, where this convention is more popular and IIUC often concerns
> integer constants, that are in some way important for the C side of
> things (think of stuff like OPEN_READ). Since that is not a concern
> for Guix, a package manager mostly written in Guile Scheme, we can
> prefix our constants with a percent sign.

Thanks, Leo.