I would definitely prefer : over #: ... however, I dislike sanctioning of multiple things for the same purpose. For instance, two small annoyances for me are
1) that square braces [] seem to be the same as parentheses in Racket. Thus, I cannot without a non-standard reader use their succinct nature for something else useful. To me, (let ((this that)) is just as fine as (let ([this that]); in fact, I waste more time thinking about whether it's (parameterized [(this that)] or ([this that]). 2) that commas are just whitespace in Clojure, thus leading to not being able to assign a more established Lisp meaning to the comma. There is public relations breakage potential beyond tokenization. After DrRacket would be adjusted to accommodate new token meaning to :colon-entities, other displayers such as emacs and syntax coloring utilities on the web would be a long off before they accommodated the Racket community's needs, reducing Racket's aesthetics, not improving it. Maintainers of those utilities probably have Racket lower on their list than we do. For my uses of Racket, it is more important that the main developers continuing to spend their time on performance enhancements and marketing instead of expending energy dealing with the inevitable blowback from people who chose legally and perhaps with purpose to use colons. I agree with the aesthetic, but not the cost-benefit. On Wednesday, October 14, 2015 at 1:12:39 AM UTC-4, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > > I think that Racket 6.3 would be a great time to make `:abc` read the > same as `#:abc`. > > For those of us who are pained deeply by `#:abc`, being able to use > `:abc` would be a big aesthetic improvement for Racket. > > Neil V. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-dev/20e5eb7b-18ac-4ed2-a020-6eeb848f97cb%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
