With respect to preserving undocumented behaviour, while in general I'm in favour of making compilers stricter, in this case it seems like the change breaks a lot of existing code in ways that are impossible for library consumers to fix themselves - they have to wait for an update to the library, or fork it. Leaving the symbol option seems like a very low-impact change, it's not going to be a massive amount of technical debt in Clojure itself. There are many areas of unspecified behaviour in the reader (for example, keywords starting with numbers, the keyword function allowing creation of unreadable keywords etc) which have not been fixed because it would break some existing code - I suspect the impact of fixing that would be far less than the impact of this change.
I don't understand why this particular change is so important that significant breakage to real code is considered acceptable. I agree with Brian that it doesn't seem very pragmatic. On 21 August 2016 at 13:22, Brian Marick <mar...@roundingpegs.com> wrote: > > On Aug 20, 2016, at 6:30 PM, Timothy Baldridge <tbaldri...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Brian, let's make it more concrete then...why should the Clojure compiler > continue to support undocumented features that make code unportable? > > > Because: > > 1. People who want to port to clojurescript will incur exactly the same > cost as they do now. > 2. People who don’t want to port to clojurescript will incur no additional > cost. > 3. Clojurescript maintainers will incur no additional cost. > 4. Clojure maintainers will incur the cost of adding “or symbol” to > current code. > 5. No one writing documentation will incur any cost, as what was not > mentioned before will continue to be unmentioned. > > 6. There will be a psychic cost because of an undocumented inconsistency > between clojure and clojurescript. > 7. If, at some point, clojure and clojurescript shared code for the > implementation of `ns`, one or the other would have to change the pre > 1.9-alpha11 behavior. > > Do I have this enumeration of costs wrong? > > It’s a bit surprising to me that my explicit appeal to consider costs and > benefits to real people is not being addressed. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Clojure" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
