Re: [q-lang-users] [cowan: Chicken Scheme to Q interface almost ready for beta]

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> I'm really, really close to releasing the beta version of my egg for
> Chicken Scheme, which provides Chicken programmers with convenient access
> to the Q interpreter.

Hey, that's great! I'm currently downloading Chicken s.t. it's ready to 
go when you release your Q egg...

> Nevertheless, this *is* surprising, and means that to represent "1+2+3"
> as an S-expression one must write nested q:call lists.

Yes, but that's to be expected. In difference to Lisp, Q's (+) is *not* 
variadic. If this is really too much hassle, you could maybe add 
something like a q:foldl/q:foldr macro which does the necessary 
expansion or translates to a q:call of Q's foldl1/foldr1.

> I thought of
> treating applications where the second element is an operator specially,

I'd say that's a bad idea, because it's inconsistent (at least from Q's 
POV) and gives the Chicken programmer a very wrong idea about how these 
operators behave in Q. Also, you'd have to handle user-defined 
operators, too. Therefore I'd favour the idea of having a separate macro 
to handle these cases.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag