3 ms·
Owl's pretty nice, but I wish it was documented better: I can't actually get into it, because I have no idea what is valid Owl. Also, I like how it doesn't cal
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Owl's pretty nice, but I wish it was documented better: I can't actually get into it, because I have no idea what is valid Owl.
Also, I like how it doesn't call itself Scheme, because it's not Scheme.
This is a problem that annoys me: people seem to think that if you're a lisp-1, and you follow a few naming conventions, you can call yourself scheme. That's like calling yourself Common Lisp because you're a lisp-2 with setf.
Scheme is a family of languages, true, but it does have a formal spec, and if you do not follow it (or at least approximate it), than you are not scheme. Scheme inspired, or scheme derived, maybe, (Racket got this one right, and changed its name once it started going too far afield, thus saving us from having to explain to 1000 confused newbies that PLT Scheme isn't Scheme, and now must only deal with people who tell newbies that Racket is Scheme) but if you don't meet IEEE or RnRS, or at least Scheme as described in AIM-349 (the original Scheme: a radically different language from Scheme today), than you're not Scheme, and if you call yourself that, than you'll confuse people.
/rant
- nilved 10y agoThe title is "a purely functional Scheme..."
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNo, no, I think Owl did well, because it didn't say that it's scheme, at least up front. It's honestly more akin to DSSSL than anything else. Saying that it's "functional scheme" is far less likely to cause confusion than some of the other things people have done. EDIT: No, it's not like DSSSL, and it's less cool than I thought it was. It's still cool, though.