Re: Emacs Scheme interface

[Keisuke Nishida <kxn30@po.cwru.edu>]

Kalle Olavi Niemitalo <tosi@ees2.oulu.fi> writes:

> Many Emacs Lisp special forms like `save-excursion' take a list
> of expressions to evaluate.  In Scheme, it seems more common to
> instead take a thunk to call: `dynamic-wind' and
> `with-input-from-file' work this way.
> 
> Should the Scheme versions of `save-excursion' and others be
> changed to take a thunk parameter?  (Then they wouldn't even have
> to be macros.)

I think everything in Scheme should be organized in the way of Scheme,
including the naming style.  In that sense, the new save-excursion
should take a thunk parameter.

> The macros are more convenient, though.  Perhaps we should
> provide both a procedure `call-saving-excursion' and a macro
> `save-excursion'.

Maybe... but having two different expressions may be confusing.
Does Guile have any macro like `save-excursion'?  If so, providing
it as a macro would be OK.  If not, only call-saving-excursion might
be enough.  I prefer consistency to convenience.  One may define
one's own convenient syntax in Scheme.  (Good defaults are important,
though...)

Maybe the new (emacs macro) should provide those convenient macros?