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1 point by conanite 5954 days ago | link | parent

Aha. So uniq in its current form is really 'kinda-uniq. How important is it that gensyms aren't equal to each other? I mean, if "everyone knows" /gs[0-9]+/ is "reserved" for gensyms, then all we need do is not make symbols matching that pattern. Thus is the language minimaler.

I'm just being lazy. It can't be that difficult to implement ...



2 points by absz 5954 days ago | link

For now, it's not: see http://arclanguage.org/item?id=7529 . Thanks to mzscheme, it's a one-line change :)

And does that really make the language more minimal? If we leave uniq as it is, we could move it to arc.arc, but we have the axiom that symbols of the form /gs\d+/ are forbidden; if we change uniq, uniq is an axiom, but we don't have to worry about formats.

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2 points by stefano 5954 days ago | link

Even if Arc were not based on mzscheme the change would be minimal: it takes exactly the same operations as creating a normal symbol, with the difference that it doesn't have to be interned.

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2 points by conanite 5953 days ago | link

"doesn't have to be", or must not be interned? I'm thinking the latter, if the point is to guarantee that no other symbol shall be equal to a gensym ...

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3 points by stefano 5953 days ago | link

You're right: it must not be interned.

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