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<sneek>wb dsmith

<ArneBab>meaty: Guile also supports #! ... !# comments which are pretty useful to have a custom hashbang while still being plain Scheme.

<ArneBab>meaty: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Block-Comments.html

<ArneBab>meaty: ah, sorry, no that isn’t the same thing. Those are block comments, not s-expression comments.

<dsmith>sneek, botsnack

<sneek>:)

<lechner>Hi, why does 'setsid' raise a non-continuable exception, please? How may I catch EPERM?

<lechner>Hi, what's a quasiquote, philosophically speaking? What if the entire language were quasiquoted like some REPLs? Would we still need 'values'?

<ieure>What REPLs quasiquote everything?

<ieure>And are you speaking of 'values' in the sense of Multiple Values? https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Multiple-Values.html

<ieure>Or in the plain sense, meaning data?

<lechner>well, i'm not sure i'm ready for a counter-question, but both the guile and the guix REPLs use unquote to access a meta-level of instructions. Yet, it doesn't have to be that way: If more things were quasiquoted, an eval is a comma away surrounded by data. i'm just wondering if that's an alternative universe---metaphorically speaking

<ieure>Are you talking about the REPL meta-commands like ,use?

<lechner>yes, but perhaps more generally

<ieure>REPL metacommands ape the syntax of quasiquoting, but the mechanism is different.

<ieure>Honestly not sure I understand your question.

<ieure>Lisp code is also a Lisp value, quasiquoting (meaning `(foo bar ,(+1 3)) etc) puts some values in other values.

<ieure>If you have no values, you have no programming language.

<lechner>ieure / okay, thanks! I guess what I was getting to, and what the Guile REPL just told me: "unquote: expression not valid outside of quasiquote" so it would be an alternative universe, except it doesn't exist.

<ieure>What did you eval to get that error?

<ieure> I guess it would have had to be something like: (+ 1 ,foo)

<lechner>yes, i wrote a shell integration helper for Guile programs so I'm exploring the boundary between strings and sexps

<lechner>quasiquote is the star

<ieure>lechner, Have you ever implemented a toy Lisp before?

<lechner>i have seen the five equations, if that's what you mean

<sham1>Quasiquote is just a way to create data structures that are made of *mostly* literal data, but with some more complex computation added in

<sham1>Not sure there's much more than that philosophically speaking

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2025-04-28.log