Re: [Chicken-hackers] [CR] Make keywords distinct from symbols

[Peter Bex]

On Mon, May 06, 2019 at 10:30:14PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
> Some of the defining forms reject keywords now, but there may be some
> we missed, and by making them completely distinct we fix these problems
> for good. For the vast majority of the code out there this is an
> unimportant change. Code which relies on symbol? returning #t for keywords
> will run into trouble (but is usually easy to fix by adding another cond
> clause for keyword?, which will happily be backwards compatible to older
> CHICKENs). There may be other obscure uses of keywords that will fail, but
> I can't really think of many.

So far nobody has bothered to reply here or on the ticket at all.
It will be two weeks after next Monday (the 20th).

As our process document at https://wiki.call-cc.org/change-requests
says that if two weeks pass without comments, it should be assumed nobody
cares enough or has a problem with the change.

I've heard from Felix on IRC, he said he's worried we're changing too
much at once in 5.1.  Personally, I think if we make this change in a
later version it'll be more frustrating for users, because we're already
changing how keywords behave (no plists, cannot be used as identifiers
anymore).  Making keywords and symbols distinct types later means we'll
have two such changes.

To sum up, we could:

1) Not make this change at all
2) Do it anyway in 5.1
3) Do it in some later version (but how long do we wait?)

What do the other hackers think?  Please, speak up!

Cheers,
Peter

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