On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 04:04:10PM +0200, Taylan Ulrich B. wrote:
> Peter Bex <Peter.Bex@xs4all.nl> writes:
>
> > [...] what should happen when the underscore is chosen as the ellipsis
> > identifier?
>
> Intuitively I would expect it to work as ellipsis in that case, because
> we're explicitly specifying that, whereas the default meaning is
> implicit.  I can't see if draft 9 specifies anything about this, though.

That's what I intuitively thought, as well.  And it was easiest to
add it this way to Chicken's syntax-rules implementation :)

> "A subpattern followed by <ellipsis> can match zero or more elements of
> the input, unless <ellipsis> appears in the <literal>s, in which case it
> is matched as a literal."
>
> This sounds to me like (syntax-rules foo (foo) ...) would match `foo'
> literally, because first <ellipsis> is made to be `foo', and then an
> <ellipsis> (a `foo') appears in the <literal>s.

To me it made more sense to let foo be seen as an ellipsis, but it could
really go either way I think.  For safety, you could even raise an error
that this kind of madness is not supported.

> I don't know if this is
> the intended meaning; in any case it's a useless use-case(!), so in my
> opinion, leaving it unspecified is as good as forcing it to be an error,
> or making up another specific meaning for it.

Yeah, I agree it should probably stay unspecified.

> Perhaps the formal semantics solve either or both issues; I personally
> have a hard time reading those. :)
>
> By the way, I wonder why we can't specify an alternative for the
> underscore, while we can specify what to use as <ellipsis>.

The more I think about it, the more I think the underscore wildcard is a
big mistake.  It's unneccessary, does not extend cleanly like you pointed
out, and breaks backwards compatibility.  But voting has ended, so this
is likely to be kept as-is.

Cheers,
Peter
--
http://www.more-magic.net

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