[racket-dev] Square-bracket-sensitive macros in Scribble sandboxes

Yesterday, Neil Toronto wrote:
> Without extra assumptions, it's impossible to tell what's supposed
> to be an element and what's supposed to be a row. For example, this
> is ambiguous:
> 
>    (array ((list 1 2)))
> 
> It could be a one-dimensional array containing just '(1 2), or a 1x3
> array containing 'list, '1 and '2.
> 
> My current "extra assumption" is that "[" means "this is a row", and
> anything else means "this is an element". The extra assumption could
> also be that everything is quasiquoted, and then the shape of the
> parens wouldn't matter.

I'm probably missing the problem, which wouldn't be surprising since I
didn't even tried to look up the `array' documentation...  But, there
are two things that seem relevant:

1. For just plain vector syntax, you still have quasiquotes do the
   usual thing, it only happens that #(...)s are implicitly quoted.
   So:
     -> #((list 1 2))
     '#((list 1 2))
     -> #(,(list 1 2))
     '#(,(list 1 2))
     -> `#(,(list 1 2))
     '#((1 2))

2. Alternatively, the last paragraph that you wrote above can also be
   easily translated by just replacing "[" with "#(", so the array
   macro distinguishes its contents based on that:
     -> (define-syntax foo
          (syntax-rules ()
            [(foo #(x ...)) (list 'array x ...)]
            [(foo x)        (list 'datum x)]))
     -> (foo (+ 1 2))
     '(datum 3)
     -> (foo #((+ 1 2)))
     '(array 3)
   It's obviously a trivially simple example, but if you currently
   just dispatch on the paren-shape, then using #(...) instead should
   work just as well, be more robust, and not introduce the
   shape-dependent feature.

Am I missing something?

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!