Re: reading symbols containing apostrophe

[Taylan Kammer]

On 30.12.2020 05:51, Tom Gillespie wrote:
> Hi,
>     I'm in the processes of reviewing reader behavior for a number of
> different lisp dialects and Guile has a quirk that I have been unable
> to find any documentation about. Specifically, as far as I can tell
> apostrophe is not allowed in identifiers according to the formal
> grammars for r5rs through r7rs (I have not checked earlier versions).
> In addition apostrophe is not included in the extended reader syntax
> in the manual. However, 'a'b'c reads as a'b'c in guile 2.2.6. Am I
> missing something? Is this a bug?

Hi Tom,

It's quite common for implementations to extend the standard, so 
something that's "an error" in the standard might be allowed in an 
implementation.

This is evidently one of those cases.

I would not *rely* on Guile supporting this either though.  Maybe in a 
future version the reader will be changed and it will stop working.


- Taylan