[scheme-reports-wg2] Uninterned symbols

[Alex Shinn]

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 5:00 PM, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen <

I am not referring to the small language, but to the large language. This
http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/RejectedDocket

Ah, OK. I don't consider that set in stone. There's nothing stopping
you from writing an uninterned symbol SRFI, or even promoting it
for the large language.

Historically these were used by Common-Lisp to get around hygiene issues,

but Scheme has hygienic macros, making them much less useful. With a
low-level hygienic macro facility, any renamed identifier can serve as an
uninterned symbol.

This is fine and this covers most use cases of uninterned symbols in other
Lisp dialects. Some libraries, like SRFI 99 or SRFI 131, however, strip
hygiene, creating the need of uninterned symbols (which may be viewed as a
design error of these libraries).

Reluctant to revisit that discussion, but I suspect
uninterned symbols would actually be the worst of
both worlds for this purpose.
--
Alex

Marc

--
Alex
On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 3:26 AM, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen <

I just noticed that uninterned symbols were rejected by a vote. What was
the rationale for this?
I can think of a number of natural use cases for uninterned symbols, for
example, as keys in weak hash tables (interned symbols as keys make not as
much sense because they can never be considered garbage collected because
they can always be recreated by string->symbol). Compiler writers will have
another use case, namely when code transformers need to insert fresh
identifiers. As another use case I can think of procedural record
interfaces like SRFI 99 where uninterned symbols could be used to add
record fields without the danger of a name clash.
--
Marc
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