[racket] lazy letrec-values

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 14 19:17:27 EDT 2014

Doesn't Jacob's dissertation give us some guidance on the question
you're asking?

(I too prefer option #2.)

Robby

On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> I would much prefer option 2. We don't want to be needlessly different than R.
>
> One question we may wish to consider is what the semantic relationship is between LR and R. This one was easy for TR and R. Here, I am not sure what to say (exactly) but figuring this out, would help a lot getting a handle on LR's design principles.
>
> -- Matthias
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 14, 2014, at 1:09 PM, Stephen Chang <stchang at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
>> The problem was that the values constructor in Lazy Racket had two
>> different semantics, depending on the number of arguments, but the
>> extractors (ie let-values and friends) only handled the latter. We
>> should decide on one consistent behavior, mv's should either behave
>> like:
>>
>> 1) tuples in a lazy language, or
>> 2) racket values
>>
>> LR mv's already mostly behave like #1, and not like racket values. For
>> example, (values 1 2) returns a multiple-values struct instance that
>> can be passed around before extracting the values, something you
>> cannot do in Racket. So it seems odd to me to enforce the Racket-like
>> values behavior for only single-value values. The patch just makes all
>> mv's consistently have the #1 behavior.
>>
>>> but now you get a different kind of
>>> breakage where
>>>
>>>  (let-values ([(x) (values (error "a"))]) 1)
>>>  (let-values ([(x)         (error "a") ]) 1)
>>>
>>> are not the same.
>>
>> If we want behavior #1, then these should not be the same, since you
>> have to force down "one level" to get the shape, as Robby mentioned.
>>
>> If we want #2, the Racket-values behavior, then it seems to me like
>> the right thing to do is to use !values everywhere instead of !. I
>> understand not wanting to do so since it adds an extra check for every
>> force, but since lazy Racket is not really performant enough for
>> practical use, maybe this doesn't matter?
>>
>>
>>
>>> More than that, the hack of dealing with multiple
>>> values is at such a (bad) level, that it's possible that the patch would
>>> break code that assumes that `E' is equivalent to (values E).
>>>
>>> A more proper way to deal with `*-values' constructs would be for the
>>> macro to treat a case of != 0 values differently from a single value, so
>>> the force that breaks the above is not done.  That is, this kind of
>>> change would make these two:
>>>
>>>> (let-values ([(x) (values (error "poof"))]) 1)
>>>    1 ; `values' doesn't wrap, but (x) means no !-ing
>>>> (let-values ([(x y) (values (error "poof"))]) 1)
>>>    poof ; since now there are (x y) so the macro !s the RHS
>>>
>>> This is clearly not great either, but I think that overall it would be
>>> more consistent.  (But of course it's not a 10-second fix.)
>>>
>>> (A much better way to deal with MVs is to have "TLR" (= TR+LR).)
>>>
>>> --
>>>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>>>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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