[Larceny-users] Probably not a bug in R6RS, but...

[William D Clinger]

David Rush wrote:
> Should I report this as a bug?

I don't think you need to file a bug ticket.  The use
of \ as an escape character within symbols is not a
legal R5RS, ERR5RS, or R6RS syntax, and is already
deprecated (see the read-traditional-weirdness?
parameter [1]).  If this is considered to be a bug,
the most likely way we'd fix it is to drop support
for that weirdness or to change the defaults so you
couldn't use any of the traditional weirdness without
some kind of #!traditional-weirdness flag.

In any event, the \ escape appears to be working as
documented, so the only bug here would be with its
traditional semantics or with our decision to support
that semantics.

You could use the Greek letter lambda instead of a
backslash, and I think that's likely to become a
common convention as more implementations support
Unicode.  In Larceny v0.97b1, however, that works
only for interactive ports and only when the -utf8
option was specified on the command line.  (It's
possible to use UTF-8 or UTF-16 in source code files,
but doing so is too awkward and undocumented for
non-wizards.)  For now, you can use \x3bb; in source
files and the Greek letter lambda at the REPL.

Depending on your machine, of course, it may be more
trouble to type a real Greek lambda than to type the
traditional "lambda" or the R6RS "\x3bb;".  Oh well.

Will


[1] https://trac.ccs.neu.edu/trac/larceny/wiki/LexicalConversion