Re: A minor name improvement suggestion to Guile API

[parawaiter]

On Dec 17, 2009, at 20:05 , Keith Wright wrote:
> Currently, the variables that Scheme programmers know as
> |<| and |>|, are called in C _less and _gr.

This probably also applies to things like string<? -> string_lt() (string_lt_p 
?)

> Propose to rename the C variables so that |<| and |>|
> are called in C *_lt* and and *_gt*, respectively.
> 
> I'm not sure whether the asterisks are meant to
> be part of the name.

I think that is an artifact of a multipart mime font-change.

>  This seems good to me; what
> was the programmer thinking that made it seem
> good to have asymmetric identifers for
> |<| and |>|?  The names .LT. and .GT. go back
> to the Fortran of the late fifties.

I don't see how _less and _gr was introduced with any consideration either, 
except just having to have a name as they were implemented.

> Whether it is worth the trouble to change,
> I don't know.

That's the question, and I'll leave that to you guys. lt, gt, are universally 
known. Even /bin/sh 'test' uses this. And as far as scheme implementations go, 
I've probably found mine (for my kind of C-integrated usage) in chibi-scheme, 
so disregard my opinion as anything but an outsider. I'm just saying that I 
think the original poster has a point and his suggestion is what I would expect 
to find when searching for the C-equivalents of the given scheme predicates...

Best regards,

  Lars J