4 ms·

I am not a scheme/lisp expert by any means. But from following the discussion on reddit, it seems that the most biting criticism of Arc are not related to unic

by utnick 19y ago

I am not a scheme/lisp expert by any means. But from following the discussion on reddit, it seems that the most biting criticism of Arc are not related to unicode or w3c specs, but that Arc doesn't have any enhancements over scheme besides shortening some keywords. Can someone with more knowledge than me weigh in on what Arc gives us that scheme doesn't?

shiro 19y ago
I think its more like going back to the initial spirit of Scheme and making it right: "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary." So, criticizing lack of features is meaningless to Arc. Valid criticism may be to find weaknesses and restrictions.
rkts 19y ago
An official implementation.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
chandler 19y ago
One of the more frustrating aspects of Scheme, to me, is that most implementations layer a defacto strong type system on a weakly-typed base (something CL does not suffer from, to a certain extent). "What does this mean," you ask? Here we go! (define (dumb-fun s) (let ((front (substring s 0 3)) (back (substring s (- (string-length s 4)) (sub1 (string-length s))))) (or (string-ci=? front "was") (string-ci=? back "good") (string-ci=? s "Yesterday")))) Notice how, even though we didn't declare "s" to be a string when binding it, we end up declaring its type in every single function call involving it. Basically, most Scheme implementations end up with some kind of bizarre inverse-type system, where programmers perform all of the work (extensive type declarations) and receive none of the reward (compile-type type checking). (This is all an artifact of how the rXrs's have been traditionally written--lacking standard support for generic functions or type-introspection, they've essentially set the precedent by "typing" the functions provided in the standard. For example, and straight from r5rs, we have: length string-length vector-length <= char<=? string<=? Is it any surprise implementations end up with functions like 'bytes-length', 'hash-table-length', etc?). It seems that pg is vaguely cognizant of this deficiency by overloading the common operators; however, unlike CL (or even Haskell, for that matter), Arc doesn't yet provide a way of extending the functions beyond the predefined types.

by utnick 19y ago

shiro 19y ago

I think its more like going back to the initial spirit of Scheme and making it right: "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary." So, criticizing lack of features is meaningless to Arc. Valid criticism may be to find weaknesses and restrictions.

rkts 19y ago

An official implementation.

deleted 19y ago
[deleted]

chandler 19y ago

One of the more frustrating aspects of Scheme, to me, is that most implementations layer a defacto strong type system on a weakly-typed base (something CL does not suffer from, to a certain extent). "What does this mean," you ask? Here we go! (define (dumb-fun s) (let ((front (substring s 0 3)) (back (substring s (- (string-length s 4)) (sub1 (string-length s))))) (or (string-ci=? front "was") (string-ci=? back "good") (string-ci=? s "Yesterday")))) Notice how, even though we didn't declare "s" to be a string when binding it, we end up declaring its type in every single function call involving it. Basically, most Scheme implementations end up with some kind of bizarre inverse-type system, where programmers perform all of the work (extensive type declarations) and receive none of the reward (compile-type type checking). (This is all an artifact of how the rXrs's have been traditionally written--lacking standard support for generic functions or type-introspection, they've essentially set the precedent by "typing" the functions provided in the standard. For example, and straight from r5rs, we have: length string-length vector-length <= char<=? string<=? Is it any surprise implementations end up with functions like 'bytes-length', 'hash-table-length', etc?). It seems that pg is vaguely cognizant of this deficiency by overloading the common operators; however, unlike CL (or even Haskell, for that matter), Arc doesn't yet provide a way of extending the functions beyond the predefined types.