Hi Michele, Michele La Monaca <mikele.chic...@lamonaca.net> writes:
> Maybe this is not the right list for that, sorry. yeah, this one probably better fits chicken-users as it's not really about Chicken's implementation, so you might be losing some broader audience by posting it here. No problemo, though! > In fact, it makes the usage of substring "unsafe" and the > countermeasures I can imagine (manual bounds checks, padding, writing > my-own-substring-function, whatever) are quite unsatisfactory... to me > at least. I felt the same when coming to Scheme (from Ruby in my case). But after having been immersed in the langauge and community surrounding it for a while now I came to see it in a different light: What might look like impracticality at the beginning turns out to be a virtue in its own right. All languages you cite (well, apart from Python perhaps, as Peter noted) are from the DWIM-most-of-the-time spectrum which give a lot of leeway. This often leads to what Olin Shivers vividly describes as 80% solutions in the preamble of the SRE announcement (see http://www.scsh.net/docu/post/sre.html). I recommend you to read that one if you don't already know it. Scheme as a whole tries to aim for the 100% solutions (whether it's successful in that endeavor is open for debate, of course). That's why you'll often see functions reduced to their bare minimum purpose and correct behavior even in edge cases. This is especially true for functions defined in the standard core such as the one you are referring to. The nice thing is that from that solid core as a foundation we can build libraries which allow us to be a bit more sloppy when we want to whereas it's much harder to go the other way around. It may sound a bit like "just drink the Kool-Aid" but what I'm trying to say is: Scheme, as any language, has its own culture and you will be much happier when you try to embrace it rather than trying to impose concepts from other languages on it. But you probably already know this, so I hope my comment on the specific case of your substring issue is of help, anyway :-) Moritz _______________________________________________ Chicken-hackers mailing list Chicken-hackers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-hackers
