[Scheme-reports] Draft 3 Comments: Chapter 1 Denis Washington (25 Jul 2011 17:27 UTC)
Re: [Scheme-reports] Draft 3 Comments: Chapter 1 John Cowan (26 Jul 2011 02:39 UTC)

[Scheme-reports] Draft 3 Comments: Chapter 1 Denis Washington 25 Jul 2011 17:26 UTC

Hello,

As I had some time to spare, I thought I'd use it to review the first
chapter of the third draft and write up some comments section by section
(taking inspiration from Andy Wingo, who has done an outstanding job
reviewing all of draft 2). I hope my comments are helpful for the next
draft. Let's start:

Introduction
============

Nice to see my name here! Now I'm finally a historic person. ;)

1.3.1 Base and optional features
================================

Nice "module-aware" replacement for the original R5RS section.

IIRC it was said in the WG1 newsgroup that the notion of "optional" in
the report was going to be precised to mean "mandatory except if the
implementation is constrained by its environment" (e.g., missing
floating-point on some embedded systems). However, I do not find such
language in this section. Was the idea dismissed after all? Or simply
forgotten?

1.3.2 Error situations and unspecified behavior
===============================================

The new paragraph on an error being signalled as if by "raise" is placed
somewhat unfortunate position, as the next paragraph starting with "For
example" is logically connected with its original previous paragraph. I
would rather roll this information into the first paragraph. Also, I
don't think that it has to be mentioned that the raised object need not
be fresh; "implementation-dependent" actually says everything. Lastly, a
reference to where "raise" is defined would be nice, given that this is
its first mention and it is described 5 chapters later. A proposal:

"When speaking of an error situation, this report uses the phrase “an
error is signalled” to indicate that implementations must detect and
report the error by raising a non-continuable exception, as if by the
procedure raise (see section 6.5). If such wording does not appear..."

Everything else in this chapter seems to be fine. I like it so far. :)

Regards,
Denis

_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
Scheme-reports@scheme-reports.org
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports