[plt-scheme] Re: Naming style

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Sat Feb 14 18:31:42 EST 2009

On Feb 14, Will Duquette wrote:
> Thanks both, for the answers.  Keyword style is what I had in mind.
> (I do most of my programming in Tcl/Tk these days, and Scheme
> keywords seem the obvious analogy to Tcl-style option arguments.)
> 
> A follow-on question.  I gather Scheme has keyword arguments with the
> syntax #:mykeyword.  In the example
> 
>    (append 'horizontal)
> 
> you use an ordinary quoted symbol instead of a keyword symbol, e.g.,

I should have clarified what Robby wrote later -- that #1 is the
historical reason -- so using keywords was not an easy option at the
time.  So I wrote the above as an example of how it would look like
without keyword arguments -- but the same notes apply to using them.


> (And while we're on that, why is the keyword prefix "#:" instead of
> the shorter ":", as in Common Lisp?  (I don't mean to be critical;
> I'm just curious.)

IIRC, there was no consensus between `:foo' or `foo:', and Mattew
preferred to go with something that clearly doesn't break any existing
code.

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


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