Andrew, On 23-Feb-2009 Andrew Reilly wrote: > These days we mostly rely on our editor environment to provide colour > and font decoration for emphasis and legibility, I suppose.
While there is something to be said for using editors to make our lives easier, we also need to be careful of breaking source portability. This means anything other than legible text source files are a bad idea in my opinion. Syntax highlighting and auto indenting works because it doesn't embed weird and hard to read (assuming a stupid editor) extra pieces in the file. It is a feature of the editor that largely keeps the file portable and working. I haven't seen any of these features that work to solve the same thing that the style conventions used with Case Insensitive Scheme "solve," because these style conventions are not automatic, but rather chosen for elucidation in particular points. > Maybe in the next version we could get completely out of the box > and allow source code to be encoded in HTML or RTF, to allow > semantically-transparent emphasis, with font, font-size and > colour? Would there be a move at some future stage to insist > on some particular font in some context? I would hope not. I presume that you are in jest here. It is wonderful to have tools that make our lives easier, but we shouldn't tie a language into a specific toolset. In fact, I believe one of the goals of Scheme should be to demonstrate that many complex toolsets become unnecessary if the cumbersome features of a language are removed for more elegant constructus that are simpler and easier to use. > Sometimes (always?) changes break some things. Even the > well-known heroically backwards-compatible like C wind up > introducing the odd new keyword that shadows a variable name, > or tightened semantics that makes old code break (C had lots > of ways to do that, of course). One of the ways that this > is usually accommodated is for the compilation/execution > environments to have explicit backwards compatability modes. I don't mind features moving forward, but there should be an upgrade path. This is more than just a compatibility mode, but something that actually allows us to incrementally move our code forward without having to do it in bulk. R6RS wasn't very good at doing this. -- Aaron W. Hsu <[email protected]> | <http://www.sacrideo.us> "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat +++++++++++++++ ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) ++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
