Two syntax tweaks I'd like to see in Racket 5.4:
* Colon keywords -- Make symbols beginning with the colon character read
as keywords. Possibly also make keywords print as starting with colon
rather than pound-colon. I know some people don't mind "#:", but I
don't like typing it or looking at it. I think "#:" also looks
gratuitously different/cumbersome to people coming from Lisps, and
unnecessarily cryptic to people just coming from anywhere else.
* Multiple-value LHS in "let" forms -- In the "let"* forms (i.e., "let",
"let*", "letrec"), in addition to permitting the LHS of a binding to be
an identifier, also permit LHS to specify multiple idents for
multiple-value binding. Two motivations: (1) "let-values" and friends
are painfully long for something as basic as a binding form, and
increase rightward drift; and (2) when editing code to change an
existing use of a single-values "let"* form to add a multiple-values to
it, having a multiple-values LHS doesn't require adding a bunch of extra
parens to the existing single-values. Syntax-wise, I would be equally
happy with any of the three alternatives for multiple-value LHS:
"(values ID ...+)", or drop the keyword to have just "(ID ...+)". or
even drop the parens so LHS syntax is simply "ID ...+".
I've mentioned these before, but Christmas is right around the corner.
Neil V.
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