Re: Optional Arguments (was Re: CVS script)

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu>]

karlheg@inetarena.com writes:
> >>>>> "Per" == Per Bothner <bothner@cygnus.com> writes:
> 
>     Per> I am also flexible in terms how we handle #! (though I am not
>     Per> willing to remove support for #!optional etc from Kawa).
> 
>  How did DSSL get to have #! as the marker for `optional' and
>  suchlike, anyhow?  It seems to me a very poor choice of characters
>  for that.  Makes me think that the folks involved in that must not
>  use Unix at all...  weird.  How entrenched is that "standard" anyhow?
>  Why not just go "oops, bad choice", and change it to #& or somesuch?
>  How hard would it be to write a perl program to transform everyone's
>  DSSL programs to the new syntax?  Seems like changing that in the
>  DSSL implementations themselves would involve little more than a
>  search and replace anyhow.
> 

As far as I know, DSSSL picked up the #! convention from MIT Scheme,
which, also as far as I know, was first implemented on Unix. This can
only lead to the conclusion that someone had insufficient foresight
and/or was on crack. 

As to the other questions, #!optional etc is a part of the officially
adopted DSSSL spec. It is not part of any official Scheme spec, but
many Scheme implementations support it. 

Automatic search and replace probably wouldn't be hard, but is
unlikely to be seen as a solution by the authors of the various
implementations.

 - Maciej