Re: defining new character names?

[Lynn Winebarger]

On Wednesday 21 August 2002 14:06, address@hidden wrote:
> Still, the name is not really, um, wisely chosen.
    I'm not married to it.
> There's no reason
> for not expressing the functions effect in its name. 
> 
>  (name-of-char #\tab) => 'tab
>  (symbol->char 'newline) => #\12
>  (name-char! #\12 #\newline) 
      Fine by me.     

> > [ ugliness deleted]
> I'd feel uneasy with _that_. Here #\separator is not used as a character
> constant but rather as a symbolic constant.
      No, here `separator' is a variable in a completely different namespace
from Scheme variables.   I'm not sure why you consider it a constant of any
sort, symbolic or otherwise.  One character names and numeric representations
- those should be considered constants.

> Those are semantically different
> things. Also, your use would imply that the following works:
> 
>  (define (bla blub)
>    (char-name 'separator #\tab)
>    (display (format "~s~s~s" a #\separator b)) (newline))
> 
> which will probably _not_ do what you expect it to do since #\separator
> in the display statement will be expanded during _read_ time (when the
> program code gets parsed by guile), so the call to 'char-name' at runtime
> will not affect it.

       True enough. 

> We need to be carefull here to not mix two very different things. Extending
> guiles set of named character constants and maybe making this names changeable
> (not a bad thing in my opinion) and, otoh, mixing character constants with
> symbolic constants (irritating and not neccessary IMHO).
>       
      I would say you're interacting with the reader's evaluation of 
identifiers in the
#\ language (a very simple language, you're either a constant or an identifier 
that 
directly corresponds to a constant).  You could even change it so that the 
reader
parses character names into different types of objects than characters, and 
delay
evaluation of them until execution.

Lynn