SRFIs extend the Scheme programming language. You can help. Start by joining the discussion on one of our mailing lists. Learn more.
Thanks to Lassi Kortela for his srfi
command, which currently has eighty subcommands for carrying out various SRFI operations, e.g. show the abstract of a SRFI, search for a SRFI, open a SRFI in a browser, or clone the Git repo for a SRFI. It can be found in the SRFI tools directory of the srfi-common repo.
Thanks to Arvydas Silanskas for his index.scheme.org, which is an increasingly comprehensive index of Scheme implementations and standards.
Thanks to Shiro Kawai for his Practical Scheme, which includes a cross-reference showing which Scheme implementations support which SRFIs. It's a wiki page, so please help keep it up to date.
When an exceptional situation is encountered by a program, it usually creates a condition object describing the situation and then passes control to an exception handler. The signaler and handler are two different parts of a system, between which there is a barrier of abstraction. In order to recover gracefully and flexibly from exceptional situations, however, the signaler can provide multiple ways by which the handler can restart the computation, some of which may require extra input. Often, the decision of which method of recovery to choose is left up to a human user, who may be prompted for the input needed to recover. This SRFI proposes a mechanism called restarters which uses a new type of condition object and an associated exception handler to encapsulate the information necessary to restart a computation. We also describe the behavior and interface of interactor procedures, which implement interactive restarts.
Guardians allow programs to protect objects from deallocation by the garbage collector and to determine which objects would otherwise have been deallocated. When the object has associated non-memory resources, a program can register it with a guardian. The GC will mark inaccessible objects but will not collect them; at the program's convenience, inaccessible objects are removed from the guardian and their non-memory resources are disposed of. Guardians allow objects to be saved from deallocation indefinitely so that they can be reused or so that clean-up or other actions can be performed using the data stored within the objects. Guardians avoid the problems associated with classical finalizers detailed in the Rationale section.
Data validation and type checking (supposedly) make for more correct code. And faster code too, sometimes. And, in rare cases, code that's easier to follow than the un-checked one. Unfortunately, Scheme does not have many (type-)checking primitives out of the box. This SRFI provides some, with the aim of allowing more performant and correct code with minimum effort on the user side. Both (manual) argument checking/validation (check-arg
) and return value(s) (values-checked
) checking/coercion are provided. Syntax sugar like lambda-checked
and define-checked
is added on top.
This defines an extension of the SRFI 64 test suite API to support property testing. It uses SRFI 158 generators to generate test inputs, which allows for the creation of custom input generators. It uses SRFI 194 as the source of random data, so that the generation of random test inputs can be made deterministic. For convenience, it also provides procedures to create test input generators for the types specified in R7RS-small. The interface to run property tests is similar to that of SRFI 64, and a property-testing-specific test runner is specified in order to display the results of the propertized tests.
Scheme has traditionally required procedure bodies and the bodies of derived constructs
such as let
to contain definitions followed by commands/expressions.
This SRFI proposes to allow mixing commands and groups of definitions in such bodies, so that each
command/expression is in the scope of all local definition groups preceding it, but not in scope of
the local definition groups following it. This approach is backwards compatible with R7RS and
upholds the intuitive rule that to find the definition of a lexical variable, one has
to look up the source code tree.
This SRFI defines an interface to hash tables, which are widely recognized as a fundamental data structure for a wide variety of applications. A hash table is a data structure that:
Unlike the hash tables of SRFI 125, which is the direct ancestor of this specification, the hash tables described here are ordered by insertion: that is, associations inserted earlier in the history of the hash table appear earlier in the ordering. Advances in the implementations of hash tables, as provided by C++, Python, JavaScript, etc., make the provision of this new facility practical. As a result, the hash tables of this SRFI do not interoperate with the hash tables of SRFI 125, SRFI 126, or existing R6RS implementations.
When an exceptional situation is encountered by a program, it may create a condition object describing the situation and then signal the condition and pass control to a condition handler. The signaler and handler are two different parts of a system, between which there is a barrier of abstraction. In order to recover gracefully and flexibly from exceptional situations, however, the signaler can provide multiple ways by which the handler can restart the computation, some of which may require extra input. Often, the decision of which method of recovery to choose is left up to a human user, who may be prompted for the input needed to recover. This SRFI proposes a simple mechanism called restarters to encapsulate the information necessary to restart a computation with associated interactive prompters.
Scheme's exception system is extended so that exception handlers gain access to the delimited continuation representing the rest of the computation of the call of the thunk guarded by the handler. Algebraic effect handlers can be directly expressed in this extended exception system. The system directly implements the shift0
/reset0
delimited control operators. It is well known that other delimited control operators like prompt0
/control0
or reset
/shift
are expressible in shift0
/reset0
(and vice versa).
This SRFI extends Scheme with a simple mechanism to implicitly add formal arguments to procedure definitions and to implicitly add arguments to procedure calls. Contrary to parameters (also known as fluids or dynamically bound variables), which can be used for the same purpose, no runtime overhead is generated.
Guardians allow programs to protect objects from deallocation by the garbage collector and to determine which objects would otherwise have been deallocated. When the object has associated non-memory resources, a program can register it with a guardian. The GC will mark inaccessible objects but will not collect them; at the program's convenience, inaccessible objects are removed from the guardian and their non-memory resources are disposed of. Guardians allow objects to be saved from deallocation indefinitely so that they can be reused or so that clean-up or other actions can be performed using the data stored within the objects. Guardians avoid the problems associated with classical finalizers detailed in the Rationale section.
Scheme has traditionally required procedure bodies and the bodies of derived constructs such as let
to contain definitions followed by expressions. This SRFI proposes to allow expressions to appear before and intermingled with definitions in such bodies, as was allowed in program bodies by the R6RS and in library bodies by R7RS small.
A define-values
form is a definition that binds multiple variables from a single expression returning multiple values.
This SRFI suggests how the Scheme reader and writer should handle unreadable data in general, and unreadable objects in particular.
This SRFI defines a language to describe control-flow graphs (CFGs) suitable for formulating iterative and recursive algorithms. Using the notion of a CFG term, this language can be seamlessly embedded in the Scheme language. Complex CFG terms can be composed from simple CFG terms.
This SRFI describes a simple pattern matcher based on one originally devised by Kent Dybvig, Dan Friedman, and Eric Hilsdale, which has a catamorphism feature to perform recursion automatically.
This SRFI defines a version of the define-record-type
definition of R6RS
and SRFI 237 that extends the define-record-type
syntax of R7RS
, reconciling both systems.
This SRFI is meant to be adopted by R7RS-large to integrate essentially the R6RS record system compatibly with the existing R7RS-small record system.
This SRFI provides the list-case
, the syntactic fundamental list destructor.
Many programming interfaces rely on a set of condition codes where each code has a numeric ID, a mnemonic symbol, and a human-readable message. This SRFI defines a facility to translate between numbers and symbols in a codeset and to fetch messages by code. Examples are given using the Unix errno and signal codesets.
The record mechanism of R6RS is refined. In particular, the triad of record names, record-type descriptors and record constructor descriptors can be effectively ignored and replaced with the single notion of a record descriptor. We also remove the restriction that the syntactic layer can only define one constructor per record type defined.
This SRFI defines the independently
syntax, which can be
used to combine side effects into one expression without
specifying their relative order.
This SRFI contains various procedures that accept and return procedures, as well as a few others, drawn from an earlier version of Chicken. Common Lisp has a few of them too, and more come from the Standard Prelude from Programming Praxis. Using these procedures helps to keep code terse and reduce the need for ad hoc lambdas.
Topological sorting is an algorithm that takes a graph consisting of nodes and other nodes that depend on them, forming a partial order, and returns a list representing a total ordering of the graph. If the graph is cyclic, the topological sort will fail. The procedure topological-sort
returns three values. If sorting succeeds, the first value contains the result and the second and third are #false
. If sorting fails, the result is #false
and the second and third value may provide additional information about the error.
An INI file is a configuration file that consists of key-value
pairs for properties, and sections that group the properties. The
name of these configuration files comes from the filename extension
INI
, short for initialization.
The format has become an informal standard in many contexts of configuration.
This SRFI provides access to the contents of an INI file.
Scheme lacks a flexible way to create and apply curried procedures. This SRFI describes curried
, a variant of lambda
that creates true curried procedures which also behave just like ordinary Scheme procedures. They can be applied to their arguments one by one, all at once, or anywhere in between, without any novel syntax. curried
also supports nullary and variadic procedures, and procedures created with it have predictable behavior when applied to surplus arguments.
This SRFI specifies an array mechanism for Scheme. Arrays as defined here are quite general; at their most basic, an array is simply a mapping, or function, from multi-indices of exact integers $i_0,\ldots,i_{d-1}$ to Scheme values. The set of multi-indices $i_0,\ldots,i_{d-1}$ that are valid for a given array form the domain of the array. In this SRFI, each array's domain consists of the cross product of intervals of exact integers $[l_0,u_0)\times[l_1,u_1)\times\cdots\times[l_{d-1},u_{d-1})$ of $\mathbb Z^d$, $d$-tuples of integers. Thus, we introduce a data type called $d$-intervals, or more briefly intervals, that encapsulates this notion. (We borrow this terminology from, e.g., Elias Zakon's Basic Concepts of Mathematics.) Specialized variants of arrays provide portable programs with efficient representations for common use cases.
This is a revised and improved version of SRFI 179.
This SRFI defines atomic operations for the Scheme programming language. An atomic operation is an operation that, even in the presence of multiple threads, is either executed completely or not at all. Atomic operations can be used to implement mutexes and other synchronization primitives, and they can be used to make concurrent algorithms lock-free. For this, this SRFI defines two data types, atomic flags and atomic (fixnum) boxes, whose contents can be queried and mutated atomically. Moreover, each atomic operation comes with a memory order that defines the level of synchronization with other threads.
This SRFI defines tagged procedures, which are procedures that are tagged with a Scheme value when created through the syntax lambda/tag
and case-lambda/tag
. The value of the tag of a procedure can be retrieved with procedure-tag
, and the predicate procedure/tag?
discerns whether a procedure is tagged.
This SRFI specifies the opt-lambda
syntax, which generalizes lambda
. An opt-lambda
expression evaluates to a procedure that takes a number of required and a number of optional (positional) arguments whose default values are determined by evaluating corresponding expressions when the procedure is called.
This SRFI also specifies a variation opt*-lambda
, which is to opt-lambda
as let*
is to let
and the related binding constructs let-optionals
and let-optionals*
.
Finally, for those who prefer less explicit procedure definitions, a sublibrary provides define-optionals
and define-optionals*
.
Whenever an expression is evaluated during the run of a Scheme program, there is a continuation awaiting the values of the expression. It is a distinguishing property of the Scheme programming language to offer a procedure (named call/cc
) that captures the current continuation as a procedure, which, when called, aborts the then-current continuation and reinstates the captured one.
One can visualize a continuation as a list of (continuation) frames where a non-tail call adds a frame to the top of the list and where the return from a non-tail call removes the appropriate frame.
Moreover, each expression is evaluated in a dynamic environment that conceptually holds the values of parameters like the current output port and the dynamic-wind stack at the point of evaluation. As the dynamic environment is captured and reinstated along the continuation when the call/cc
machinery is used, we can view it conceptually as part of the continuation.
The libraries defined in this SRFI are all concerned with continuations in a wider sense. More specifically, the topics are as follows:
call-with-current-continuation
. Moreover, a procedure to capture so-called composable continuations is provided. As opposed to continuations captured by call-with-current-continuation
, invoking a composable continuation does not abort the then-current continuation, so composable continuations behave like ordinary procedures. Together with continuation prompts, composable continuations allow one to implement the various proposed sets of control operators for delimited continuations. Finally, a primitive (call-in-continuation
) is provided that allows calling a procedure in a given continuation instead of just delivering values to it.with-exception-handler
procedure and the guard
syntax gain additional tail-context guarantees.parameterize
syntax gains an additional tail-context guarantee. To support an alternative model of parameters that is linked to the dynamic extent and not to the current parameterization, the notion of a parameter-like object and the temporarily
syntax are introduced.Large parts of this SRFI have been inspired by the control operators provided by Racket.
The procedures of this SRFI allow callers to manipulate an object that maps keys to values without the caller needing to know exactly what the type of the object is. Such an object is called a dictionary or dict in this SRFI.
Integer maps, or fxmappings, are finite sets, where each element is an association between a fixnum (exact integer) key and an arbitrary Scheme object. They are similar to the general mappings of SRFI 146, but the restricted key-type allows implementations of fxmappings to benefit from optimized structures and algorithms. This library provides a rich set of operations on fxmappings, including analogues of most of the forms provided by SRFI 146. Fxmappings have no intrinsic order, but may be treated as ordered sets, using the natural ordering on keys; a substantial sublibrary for working with fxmappings in this fashion is included.
Generalized procedures for binary search of vector-like data structures are provided which can be applied to any sequence type, including ones defined by the user, together with applications of these procedures for Scheme’s built-in vectors.
Compound objects are analogous to R6RS compound conditions, and are suitable for use in creating and handling conditions on non-R6RS systems, among other purposes. They encapsulate an immutable sequence of subobjects, which can be any object except another compound object. It is possible to implement R6RS compound conditions on top of compound objects, but not vice versa. Note that this SRFI does not provide any analogue to R6RS simple conditions, which are just records.
This is a set of convenience routines for generators and accumulators intended to blend in with SRFI 158. The authors recommend that they be added to the (srfi 158)
library provided by users or implementations. If they are approved by the R7RS-large process, they can also be added to (r7rs generator)
.
Many language-agnostic programming tools rely on specially formatted source code comments to annotate the code with metadata. Such "magic comments" are hard for both humans and computers to parse reliably, as the purpose of a comment is to be free-form text that is not interpreted by machine.
This SRFI extends the standard Scheme directive syntax (#!
) to support line directives. They look like magic comments to language-agnostic tools but read as S-expressions in Scheme, combining the portability of magic comments with the well-defined syntax and easy parsing of ordinary Scheme code.
This SRFI codifies the following shorthand syntax, which some Scheme implementations have had for a long time.
(define ((outer-name outer-args ...) inner-args ...) inner-body ...)
These procedures allow the creation and interpretation of numerals using any set of Unicode digits that support positional notation.
Integer sets, or isets, are unordered collections of fixnums. (Fixnums are exact integers within certain implementation-specified bounds.)
This SRFI follows SRFI 203 in providing "out-of-the-box" support for hosting the exercises suggested by Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in portable Scheme.
Whereas SRFI 203 focused on the necessarily non-portable aspects of the problem set (the graphics), this SRFI aims to provide support for the rest of the features, which are far more widespread, often already provided, and in reality mostly need just a common vocabulary.
This SRFI provides procedures for working with time data, multi-threading, and streams, as well as SICP names for true
and false
.
None of these procedures is fit for production use. They are only designed for pedagogical purposes.
Students, however, are expected to be able to just write
(include (srfi sicp))
and have the code from the book run without problems (apart from those intended by the book authors).
This SRFI specifies a central log exchange for Scheme that connects log producers with log consumers. It allows multiple logging systems to interoperate and co-exist in the same program. Library code can produce log messages without knowledge of which log system is actually used. Simple applications can easily get logs on standard output, while more advanced applications can send them to a full logging system.
A flexvector, also known as a dynamic array or an arraylist, is a mutable vector-like data structure with an adjustable size. Flexvectors allow fast random access and fast insertion/removal at the end. This SRFI defines a suite of operations on flexvectors, modeled after SRFI 133's vector operations.
Using the define-property
definition described in this SRFI, expand-time properties can be associated with identifiers in a referentially transparent and lexically scoped way.
This SRFI introduces alias definitions, a syntactic extension. An alias definition transfers the binding of one identifier to another, effectively aliasing the identifier.
This SRFI describes common syntactic extensions of the syntax-rules
macro facility of R5RS and the base R6RS and R7RS libraries. In particular, library namespaces are defined where these extensions can be located and which can be tested against in cond-expand
forms.
This SRFI extends the Scheme standard with procedures and syntax dealing with multiple values, including syntax to create lists and vectors from expressions returning multiple values and procedures returning the elements of a list or vector as multiple values.
Enums are objects that serve to form sets of distinct classes that specify different modes of operation for a procedure. Their use fosters portable and readable code.
This SRFI provides procedures that dissect NaN (Not a Number) inexact values.
To ease the human reading and writing of Scheme code involving binary data that for mnemonic reasons corresponds as a whole or in part to ASCII-coded text, a notation for bytevectors is defined which allows printable ASCII characters to be used literally without being converted to their corresponding integer forms. In addition, this SRFI provides a set of procedures known as the bytestring library for constructing a bytevector from a sequence of integers, characters, strings, and/or bytevectors, and for manipulating bytevectors as if they were strings as far as possible.
syntax-rules
and syntax-case
expressions and can be both imported under the same name without conflicts.This SRFI describes procedures for command-line and terminal interface programs to safely change and reset terminal modes, for example from cooked to raw and back, and for serial-line device manipulation for interfacing with embedded hardware and the like.
It is intended to provide all the termios structure functionality a modern Scheme programmer might desire by supplying a stty procedure, and simple abstractions on top of it.
Pattern matching decomposes a compound data structure into parts and assigns those parts to variables. This SRFI describes a pattern-matching library already in use by several scheme implementations which can match many common compound data structures.
This SRFI proposes a simple library for programmatic drawing of pictures compatible with Section 2.2.4 of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
It aims to close the gap between the Scheme suggested for study in the book and portable Scheme.
The SRFI-2 library introduced the and-let*
form for short-circuited evaluation in the style of the and
form, with the ability to capture the (non-#f
) results in the style of the let*
form. This document extends the and-let*
form with the ability to pattern-match (or "destructurally bind") the values of evaluated expressions (where the match failure causes short-circuiting rather than raising an error) and the ability to handle multiple values (where only the falsehood of the first value causes short-circuiting).
This document describes a handful of syntactic extensions to the core bindings of the Scheme programming language. In particular, it proposes to extend the binding forms lambda
, let
, let*
with pattern matching capabilities, to extend the forms let
and or
with the ability to handle multiple values, and to extend the form define
with the ability of defining "curried" functions.
This SRFI discusses some of the existing pattern-matching libraries for the Scheme programming language — namely, the pattern matcher presented by Andrew K. Wright and Robert Cartwright in the paper "A Soft Type System for Scheme", the pattern matcher developed by Dan Friedman, Erik Hilsdale and Kent Dybvig, the racket/match
module distributed with the Racket programming environment, as well as the Bigloo and Gerbil pattern matchers distributed with their respective implementations. It then extracts a pattern syntax which is compatible with three of those implementations and provides extrinsic rationale for that syntax. It also provides a simple implementation of a pattern matcher which conforms to the specification of a pattern language provided in this document.
The majority of POSIX system and library calls
require accessing errno
to discern the specific cause
of an error, and some require setting it to 0 before being called.
This SRFI specifies procedures to both retrieve its value, and to
set it.
This SRFI provides means to construct, return or signal, and extract information from Scheme interfaces with "foreign" systems such as the POSIX API, databases, and libraries.
Many functional languages provide pipeline operators, like Clojure's ->
or OCaml's |>
. Pipelines are a simple, terse, and readable way to write deeply-nested expressions. This SRFI defines a family of chain
and nest
pipeline operators, which can rewrite nested expressions like (a b (c d (e f g)))
as a sequence of operations: (chain g (e f _) (c d _) (a b _))
.
Ranges are collections somewhat similar to vectors, except that they are immutable and have algorithmic representations instead of the uniform per-element data structure of vectors. The storage required is usually less than the size of the same collection stored in a vector and the time needed to reference a particular element is typically less for a range than for the same collection stored in a list. This SRFI defines a large subset of the sequence operations defined on lists, vectors, strings, and other collections. If necessary, a range can be converted to a list, vector, or string of its elements or a generator that will lazily produce each element in the range.
This SRFI extends the specification of the boxes of SRFI 111 so that they are multiple-values aware. Whereas a SRFI 111 box is limited in that it can only box a single value, multiple values can be boxed with this SRFI.
R6RS and R7RS define a command-line
procedure. While a useful baseline, the specification is not detailed enough to cover all practical situations. This SRFI clarifies the definition of command-line
and adds a few related procedures. Scheme scripts, standalone executables, compilation and REPL use are accounted for. Option parsing is out of scope.
This is an extract from the R6RS that documents its support for positioning ports. Binary ports can be positioned to read or write at a specific byte; textual ports at a specific character, although character positions can't be synthesized portably. It has been lightly edited to fit R7RS style.
Many Scheme systems provide mechanisms for inspecting the arity of a procedural value, making it a common feature, however there is no standard interface. As a result there is no portable way to observe the arity of a procedure without actually applying it. This SRFI proposes a simple interface that is consistent with existing Scheme systems' facilities and prior proposals.
This SRFI defines two disjoint immutable container types known as Maybe and Either, both of which can contain objects collectively known as their payload. A Maybe object is either a Just object or the unique object Nothing (which has no payload); an Either object is either a Right object or a Left object. Maybe represents the concept of optional values; Either represents the concept of values which are either correct (Right) or errors (Left).
Note that the terms Maybe, Just, Nothing, Either, Right, and Left are capitalized in this SRFI so as not to be confused with their ordinary use as English words. Thus "returns Nothing" means "returns the unique Nothing object"; "returns nothing" could be interpreted as "returns no values" or "returns an unspecified value".
Splicing binding constructs for syntactic keywords are versions of let-syntax
and letrec-syntax
that can be used in a definition context in the same way as begin
.
This is an extract from the R6RS that documents its support for transcoders and transcoded ports. These provide a hook into the Scheme port system from below, allowing the creation of textual ports that provide non-default encoding and decoding from arbitrary binary ports. It has been lightly edited to fit R7RS style.
Scheme specifies mutable fixed-length strings.
SRFI 118
adds two procedures, string-append!
and
string-replace!
, which allow the length of the string to change.
This SRFI provides two linear-update versions of these procedures:
that is, the implementation may change the string length or return a
new string instead.
In addition, two convenience macros are provided that make the
procedures somewhat easier to use.
This SRFI introduces a macro, DEFINE-RECORD-LAMBDA, that defines a set of procedures, that is, a group of constructors and a predicate. The constructors also make a group of procedures, namely record lambdas, that have no explicit field accessors and mutators. They can have various kinds of fields, such as common fields, required fields, optional fields, automatic fields, read-only fields, read-write fields, invisible fields, immutable fields, and virtual fields.
This SRFI introduces the formatting procedure Fox ("format of X"), which takes one required argument and a variable number of additional arguments and returns a formatted string.
Unlike the VALUES and CALL-WITH-VALUES mechanism of R5RS, this one uses an explicit representation for multiple return values as a single value, namely a procedure. Decomposition of multiple values is done by simple application. The macro, ADBMAL, evaluates to a procedure that takes one procedure argument. The ADBMAL macro can be compared with LAMBDA. While a LAMBDA expression that consists of <formals> and <body> requires some actual arguments later when the evaluated LAMBDA expression is called, an ADBMAL expression that consists of <expression>s corresponding to actual arguments of LAMBDA requires <formals> and <body>, that is, an evaluated LAMBDA expression, later when the evaluated ADBMAL expression is called.
This SRFI also introduces the new LET-syntax ALET and ALET*, which depend on ADBMAL to manipulate multiple values, and which are compatible with LET and LET* of R5RS in single-value bindings. They also have a binding form making use of VALUES and CALL-WITH-VALUES to handle multiple values, and new binding forms for list, cons, and other multiple values. In addition, they have several new binding forms for useful functions such as escape, iteration, optional arguments, etc.
This SRFI is derived from parts of library section 8.2.4, library section 8.2.7, library section 8.2.10, and library section 8.2.13 of the R6RS. These sections are themselves based on parts of SRFI 79, SRFI 80 and SRFI 81. These procedures provide a hook into the Scheme port system from below, allowing the creation of custom ports that behave as much as possible like the standard file, string, and bytevector ports, but that call a procedure to produce data to input ports or to consume data from output ports. Procedures for creating ports that transcode between bytes and characters are an important special case and are also documented in this SRFI.
This library describes a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) parser and printer. It supports JSON that may be bigger than memory.
This SRFI specifies an array mechanism for Scheme. Arrays as defined here are quite general; at their most basic, an array is simply a mapping, or function, from multi-indices of exact integers $i_0,\ldots,i_{d-1}$ to Scheme values. The set of multi-indices $i_0,\ldots,i_{d-1}$ that are valid for a given array form the domain of the array. In this SRFI, each array's domain consists of the cross product of nonempty intervals of exact integers $[l_0,u_0)\times[l_1,u_1)\times\cdots\times[l_{d-1},u_{d-1})$ of $\mathbb Z^d$, $d$-tuples of integers. Thus, we introduce a data type called $d$-intervals, or more briefly intervals, that encapsulates this notion. (We borrow this terminology from, e.g., Elias Zakon's Basic Concepts of Mathematics.) Specialized variants of arrays are specified to provide portable programs with efficient representations for common use cases.
Many Scheme implementations have keyword arguments, but they have not been widely standardized. This SRFI defines the macros lambda/kw
and call/kw
. They can be used identically in every major implementation currently in use, making it safe to use keyword arguments in portable code. The macros expand to native keyword arguments in Schemes that have them, letting programmers mix portable code and implementation-specific code.
This SRFI defines a standard command-line flag to get version information from a Scheme implementation. The output is Line-oriented S-expressions which are easy to parse from Scheme, C, and shell scripts and can co-exist with non-S-expression output. A standard vocabulary is defined; extensions are easy to make.
This SRFI defines ASCII-only equivalents to many of the character procedures in standard Scheme plus a few extra ones. Recent Scheme standards are based around Unicode but the significant syntactic elements in many file formats and network protocols are all ASCII. Such low-level code can run faster and its behavior can be easier to understand when it uses ASCII primitives.
This SRFI defines the trivial type timespec, which is used to represent the struct timespec
defined by the POSIX <time.h>
header.
This library describes a mechanism known as hooks. Hooks are a certain kind of extension point in a program that allows interleaving the execution of arbitrary code with the execution of the program without introducing any coupling between the two.
This SRFI provides two libraries for use with R7RS that provide a way to sandbox the eval
procedure to make it safer to use in evaluating Scheme expressions of doubtful provenance. The intention is to call eval
, passing it an S-expression representing a Scheme procedure and the environment defined by one of these libraries. Since code evaluated by eval
runs in a null lexical environment, the resulting procedure can then be invoked with less concern about possible side effects.
Use of these libraries does not provide any sort of safety guarantee. There are still many loopholes uncaught, including attempts to process circular structure and over-allocation of memory. The claim is only that the probability of such an attack is reduced, not that it is eliminated. However, using these libraries is a simple provision that is easy to implement and easy to use. For higher safety, it can readily be combined with other provisions.
A library implementing transducers — composable algorithmic transformations. Scheme has many different ways of expressing transformations over different collection types, but they are all unique to whatever base type they work on. This SRFI proposes a new construct, the transducer, that is oblivious to the context in which it is being used.
The host environment is the set of resources, such as the filesystem, network and processes, that are managed by the operating system on top of which a Scheme program is executing. This SRFI specifies some of the ways the host environment can be accessed from within a Scheme program. It does so by leveraging widespread support for POSIX, the Portable Operating System Interface standardized by the IEEE. Not all of the functions of this SRFI are available on all operating systems.
Many people find that large numbers are easier to read when the digits are broken into small groups. For example, the number 1582439
might be easier to read if written as 1 582 439
. This applies to source code as it does to other writing. We propose an extension of Scheme syntax to allow the underscore as a digit separator in numerical constants.
This library is a generic approach to the database abstractions known as triplestore and quadstore. Generic Tuple Store Database implements n-tuple ordered sets and associated primitives for working with them in the context of data management.
This library describes an interface for an ordered key-value store that is suitable for implementing a storage engine for the generic tuple-store SRFI. It maps cleanly to existing ordered key-value databases that may or may not provide transactions.
A library of procedures for formatting Scheme objects to text in various ways, and for easily concatenating, composing and extending these formatters efficiently without resorting to capturing and manipulating intermediate strings.
This SRFI is an updated version of SRFI 159, primarily with the difference that state variables are hygienic.
Summary of differences from SRFI 159:
written-shared
, pretty-shared
as-italic
, as-color
, as-true-color
, on-color
background variants, and pretty-with-color
ambiguous-is-wide?
state variable and string-terminal-width/wide
utilitysubstring/width
state var for width-aware substring operations, with substring-terminal-width(/wide)
utilitiessubstring/preserve
state var used in trimming, with substring-terminal-preserve
utilitypretty-environment
state variableas-unicode
to terminal-aware
upcased
and downcased
This SRFI describes the array data type (a generalization of vectors to multiple indexes or dimensions), along with a set of procedures for working on them.
This specification is an extension of SRFI 25, with additions from Racket’s math.array package and other sources. It has been implemented in the Kawa dialect of Scheme.
This is a specification of a reader form (literals) for multi-dimensional arrays. It is an extension of the Common Lisp array reader syntax to handle non-zero lower bounds, optional explicit bounds, and optional uniform element types (compatible with SRFI 4). It can be used in conjunction with SRFI 25, SRFI 122, or SRFI 164. These extensions were implemented in Guile (except the handling of rank-0 arrays), and later in Kawa.
There are recommendations for output formatting and a suggested format-array
procedure.
This SRFI provides a few extra procedures and comparators to go with SRFI 128, Comparators. Implementers are urged to add them to their SRFI 128 libraries, for which reason they are not packaged as a separate library.
Unifiable boxes are, like the boxes of SRFI 111, objects with a single mutable state. A constructor, predicate, accessor, and mutator are provided.
In addition to this, an equality predicate and union operations (link, union, unify) are provided. Applying a union operation to two unifiable boxes makes the two boxes equal (in the sense of the equality predicate). As a consequence, their state will also become identical. In the case of link and union, it will be the state of one of the two unioned boxes. In the case of unify, the state is determined by a supplied unification procedure.
Unifiable boxes are also known under the names disjoint-set data structure, union–find data structure or merge–find set.
This SRFI describes a set of operations on SRFI 4 homogeneous vector types (plus a few additional types) that are closely analogous to the vector operations library, SRFI 133. An external representation is specified which may be supported by the read
and write
procedures and by the program parser so that programs can contain references to literal homogeneous vectors.
A library of procedures for formatting Scheme objects to text in various ways, and for easily concatenating, composing and extending these formatters efficiently without resorting to capturing and manipulating intermediate strings.
This SRFI defines utility procedures that create, transform, and consume generators. A generator is simply a procedure with no arguments that works as a source of values. Every time it is called, it yields a value. Generators may be finite or infinite; a finite generator returns an end-of-file object to indicate that it is exhausted. For example, read-char
, read-line
, and read
are generators that generate characters, lines, and objects from the current input port. Generators provide lightweight laziness.
This SRFI also defines procedures that return accumulators. An accumulator is the inverse of a generator: it is a procedure of one argument that works as a sink of values.
Continuation marks are a programming language feature that allows one to attach information to and retrieve information from continuations, generalizing stack inspection. Conceptually, a continuation consists of a number of frames where each frame stands for an active procedure call that is not a tail call. A continuation mark is then a key-value pair associated with a frame, with keys compared using eq?
. At most one mark for a given key can be attached to a single frame.
Besides stack inspection, continuation marks can be used to implement dynamic scope, delimited continuations, or delayed evaluation that is able to handle iterative lazy algorithms.
This SRFI proposes to add continuation marks to the Scheme programming language. The interface defined here is modelled after Racket's continuation marks. It does not include all forms and procedures provided by Racket but provides a compatible subset.
Recognizing binary predicates as a specific area in which the use of prefix operators is an impediment, we propose a thin layer of "syntactic stevia" for in-fixing such predicates. It can be implemented using regular Scheme macros. We suggest that the code (is x < y)
should be transformed to (< x y)
, and (is x < y <= z)
-- to (let ((y* y)) (and (< x y*) (<= y* z)))
. In addition, we suggest special meaning to the _
symbol: (is _ < y)
and (is x < _)
should be transformed to (lambda (_) (< _ y))
and (lambda (_) (< x _))
, respectively. This SRFI document also describes some other uses of the is
macro and its limitations.
Scheme, like ML, is a programming language with strict evaluation while others, like Haskell, use lazy evaluation. Scheme, however, possesses the primitives delay
and force
that make it possible to express lazy algorithms.
Lazy evaluation does not go well in conjunction with imperative, non-functional, side-effecting code. It should, however, be applicable in a purely functional setting. This is the case for the delayed evaluation model as described in the R7RS as long as no dynamically bound variables, also known as parameter objects, are present. It is the purpose of this SRFI to rework the specification in the R7RS so that lazy evaluation works with purely functional code that makes use of dynamic environments or, more generally, the dynamic extent. This is done by remembering the dynamic extent in effect when the delay
expression is evaluated.
Another perceived misfeature of the R7RS model of delayed evaluation is the apparent need of the delay-force
special form to express iterative lazy algorithms. It is shown that the delay-force
special form is unneeded and that the implementation can (and should) handle iterative lazy algorithms without space leaks.
Scheme has the notion of the dynamic extent of a procedure call. A number of standard Scheme procedures and syntaxes like dynamic-wind
, call-with-current-continuation
, and parameterize
deal with the dynamic extent indirectly. The same holds true for the procedures and syntaxes dealing with continuation marks as defined by SRFI 157.
This SRFI reifies the dynamic extent into a first-class value together with a well-defined procedural interface and a syntax to create procedures that remember not only their environment at creation time but also their dynamic extent, which includes their dynamic environment.
Osets are immutable collections that can contain any Scheme objects as long as a total order exists among the objects. Osets enforce the constraint that no two elements can be the same in the sense of the oset's associated equality predicate. The elements in an oset appear in a fixed order determined by the comparator used to create it.
Scheme has an impoverished set of string-processing utilities, which is a problem for authors of portable code. This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of string-processing procedures. It is a reduced version of SRFI 13 that has been aligned with SRFI 135, Immutable Texts. Unlike SRFI 13, it has been made consistent with the R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS-small string procedures.
This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of procedures for performing bitwise logical operations on integers; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec in terms of a set of seven core operators. The sample implementation is portable, as efficient as practical with pure Scheme arithmetic (it is much more efficient to replace the core operators with C or assembly language if possible), and open source.
The precise semantics of these operators is almost never an issue. A consistent, portable set of names and parameter conventions, however, is. Hence this SRFI, which is based mainly on SRFI 33, with some changes and additions from Olin's late revisions to SRFI 33 (which were never consummated). SRFI 60 (based on SLIB) is smaller but has a few procedures of its own; some of its procedures have both native (often Common Lisp) and SRFI 33 names. They have been incorporated into this SRFI. R6RS is a subset of SRFI 60, except that all procedure names begin with a bitwise-
prefix. A few procedures have been added from the general vector SRFI 133.
Among the applications of bitwise operations are: hashing, Galois-field calculations of error-detecting and error-correcting codes, cryptography and ciphers, pseudo-random number generation, register-transfer-level modeling of digital logic designs, Fast-Fourier transforms, packing and unpacking numbers in persistent data structures, space-filling curves with applications to dimension reduction and sparse multi-dimensional database indexes, and generating approximate seed values for root-finders and transcendental function algorithms.
This SRFI differs from SRFI 142 in only two ways:
The bitwise-if
function has the argument ordering of SLIB, SRFI 60, and R6RS rather than the ordering of SRFI 33.
The order in which bits are processed by the procedures listed in the "Bits conversion" section has been clarified and some of the procedures' names have been changed. See "Bit processing order" for details.
This SRFI provides a specification and portable implementation of an extension of the ERR5RS record syntax of SRFI 131, where field names inserted by macro transformers are effectively renamed as if the macro transformer inserted a binding. This makes this SRFI compatible with the semantics of the record-type definitions of the R7RS as intended by its authors. In addition, field names may also be other types of Scheme datums, like numbers and strings, or SRFI 88 keyword objects.
The rules for valid <template>
s of <syntax rules>
are slightly softened to allow for more than one consecutive <ellipsis>
in subtemplates, and to allow pattern variables in subtemplates to be followed by more instances of the identifier <ellipsis>
than they are followed in the subpattern in which they occur.
Writing powerful syntax-rules
macros is hard because they do not compose well: The arguments of a macro expansion are not expanded. This SRFI defines an easy to comprehend high-level system for writing powerful, composable (or eager) macros, two of whose defining features are that its macro arguments are (in general) eagerly expanded and that it can be portably implemented in any Scheme implementation conforming to the R7RS.
Each syntax definition assigns a macro transformer to a keyword. The macro transformer is specified by a transformer spec, which is either an instance of syntax-rules
, an existing syntactic keyword (including macro keywords and the syntactic keywords that introduce the core forms, like lambda
, if
, or define
), or a use of a macro that eventually expands into an instance of syntax-rules
. In the latter case, the keyword of macro use is called a custom macro transformer.
Mappings are finite sets of associations, where each association is a pair consisting of a key and an arbitrary Scheme value. The keys are elements of a suitable domain. Each mapping holds no more than one association with the same key. The fundamental mapping operation is retrieving the value of an association stored in the mapping when the key is given.
A means to denote the invalidity of certain code paths in a Scheme program is proposed. It allows Scheme code to turn the evaluation into a user-defined error that need not be signalled by the implementation. Optimizing compilers may use these denotations to produce better code and to issue better warnings about dead code.
This SRFI describes numeric procedures applicable to flonums, a subset of the inexact real numbers provided by a Scheme implementation. In most Schemes, the flonums and the inexact reals are the same. These procedures are semantically equivalent to the corresponding generic procedures, but allow more efficient implementations.
This SRFI describes arithmetic procedures applicable to a limited range of exact integers only. These procedures are semantically similar to the corresponding generic-arithmetic procedures, but allow more efficient implementations.
This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of procedures for performing bitwise logical operations on integers; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec in terms of a set of seven core operators. The sample implementation is portable, as efficient as practical with pure Scheme arithmetic (it is worthwhile replacing the core operators with C or assembly language if possible), and open source.
The precise semantics of these operators is almost never an issue. A consistent, portable set of names and parameter conventions, however, is. Hence this SRFI, which is based mainly on SRFI 33, with some changes and additions from Olin's late revisions to SRFI 33 (which were never consummated). SRFI 60 (based on SLIB) is smaller but has a few procedures of its own; some of its procedures have both native (often Common Lisp) and SRFI 33 names. They have been incorporated into this SRFI. R6RS is a subset of SRFI 60, except that all procedure names begin with a bitwise-
prefix. A few procedures have been added from the general vector SRFI 133.
Among the applications of bitwise operations are: hashing, Galois-field calculations of error-detecting and error-correcting codes, cryptography and ciphers, pseudo-random number generation, register-transfer-level modeling of digital logic designs, Fast-Fourier transforms, packing and unpacking numbers in persistent data structures, space-filling curves with applications to dimension reduction and sparse multi-dimensional database indexes, and generating approximate seed values for root-finders and transcendental function algorithms.
This SRFI provides a fairly complete set of integral division and remainder operators.
This attempts to solve the same issues with R7RS strings raised by SRFI-135, but with better integration with the Scheme language.
We propose to retain the name string as the type of sequences of Unicode characters (scalar values). There are two standard subtypes of string:
string-set!
on an istring throws an error. On the other hand, the core operations string-ref
and string-length
are guaranteed to be O(1). in-placeusing
string-set!
and other operations. However, string-ref
, string-set!
, or string-length
have no performance guarantees. On many implementation they may take time proportional to the length of the string. An implementation may support other kinds of strings. For example on the Java platform it may be reasonable to consider any instance of java.lang.CharSequence
to be a string.
The main part of the proposal specifies the default bindings of various procedure names, as might be pre-defined in a REPL. Specifically, some procedures that traditionally return mutable strings are changed to return istrings. We later discuss compatibility and other library issues.
Syntax parameters are to the expansion process of a Scheme program what parameters are to the evaluation process of a Scheme program. They allow hygienic implementation of syntactic forms that would otherwise introduce implicit identifiers unhygienically.
This SRFI describes, for sufficiently POSIX-compatible systems, a portable interface for compiling Scheme programs conforming to the R7RS to binaries that can be directly executed on the host system.
This SRFI is intended to standardize a primitive run-time mechanism to create disjoint types.
SRFI 9 and the compatible R7RS-small provide Scheme with record types. The basic problem that is solved by these record types is that they allow the user to introduce new types, disjoint from all existing types. The record type system described in this document is a conservative extension to SRFI 9 and R7RS record types (in other words, the keyword define-record-type
defined in this specification can serve as the equally named keyword from SRFI 9 and R7RS and can thus be safely exported from (srfi 9)
and (scheme base)
) that is intended to solve another fundamental problem, namely the introduction of subtypes.
In Scheme, strings are a mutable data type. Although it "is an error" (R5RS and R7RS) to use string-set!
on literal strings or on strings returned by symbol->string
, and any attempt to do so "should raise an exception" (R6RS), all other strings are mutable.
Although many mutable strings are never actually mutated, the mere possibility of mutation complicates specifications of libraries that use strings, encourages precautionary copying of strings, and precludes structure sharing that could otherwise be used to make procedures such as substring
and string-append
faster and more space-efficient.
This SRFI specifies a new data type of immutable texts. It comes with efficient and portable sample implementations that guarantee O(1) indexing for both sequential and random access, even in systems whose string-ref
procedure takes linear time.
The operations of this new data type include analogues for all of the non-mutating operations on strings specified by the R7RS and most of those specified by SRFI 130, but the immutability of texts and uniformity of character-based indexing simplify the specification of those operations while avoiding several inefficiencies associated with the mutability of Scheme's strings.
This SRFI defines immutable deques. A deque is a double-ended queue, a sequence which allows elements to be added or removed efficiently from either end. A structure is immutable when all its operations leave the structure unchanged. Note that none of the procedures specified here ends with an exclamation point.
This SRFI proposes a comprehensive library of vector operations accompanied by a freely available and complete reference implementation. The reference implementation is unencumbered by copyright, and useable with no modifications on any Scheme system that is R5RS-compliant. It also provides several hooks for implementation-specific optimization as well.
This SRFI describes the API for a full-featured sort toolkit.
R5RS Scheme has an impoverished set of string-processing utilities, which is a problem for authors of portable code. Although R7RS provides some extensions and improvements, it is still very incomplete. This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of string-processing procedures; it is accompanied by a portable sample implementation of the spec.
This SRFI is derived from SRFI 13. The biggest difference is that it allows subsequences of strings to be specified by cursors as well as the traditional string indexes. In addition, it omits the comparison, case-mapping, and mutation operations of SRFI 13, as well as all procedures already present in R7RS.
This SRFI defines R7RS-style char-title-case?
, char-titlecase
, and string-titlecase
procedures.
This SRFI provides comparators, which bundle a type test predicate, an equality predicate, an ordering predicate, and a hash function (the last two are optional) into a single Scheme object. By packaging these procedures together, they can be treated as a single item for use in the implementation of data structures.
Lazy sequences (or lseqs, pronounced "ell-seeks") are a generalization of lists. In particular, an lseq is either a proper list or a dotted list whose last cdr is a SRFI 121 generator. A generator is a procedure that can be invoked with no arguments in order to lazily supply additional elements of the lseq. When a generator has no more elements to return, it returns an end-of-file object. Consequently, lazy sequences cannot reliably contain end-of-file objects.
This SRFI provides a set of procedures suitable for operating on lazy sequences based on SRFI 1.
We provide a hashtable API that takes the R6RS hashtables API as a basis and makes backwards compatible additions such as support for weak hashtables, external representation, API support for double hashing implementations, and utility procedures.
This SRFI defines an interface to hash tables, which are widely recognized as a fundamental data structure for a wide variety of applications. A hash table is a data structure that:
An ephemeron is an object with two components called its key and its datum. It differs from an ordinary pair as follows: if the garbage collector (GC) can prove that there are no references to the key except from the ephemeron itself and possibly from the datum, then it is free to break the ephemeron, dropping its reference to both key and datum. In other words, an ephemeron can be broken when nobody else cares about its key. Ephemerons can be used to construct weak vectors or lists and (possibly in combination with finalizers) weak hash tables.
Much of this specification is derived with thanks from the MIT Scheme Reference Manual.
Lisp dialects including Scheme have traditionally lacked short, simple, generic syntax for accessing and modifying the fields of arbitrary "collection" objects. We fill this gap for Scheme by defining generalized accessors, and an associated SRFI-17 setter.
This SRFI specifies an array mechanism for Scheme. Arrays as defined here are quite general; at their most basic, an array is simply a mapping, or function, from multi-indices of exact integers $i_0,\ldots,i_{d-1}$ to Scheme values. The set of multi-indices $i_0,\ldots,i_{d-1}$ that are valid for a given array form the domain of the array. In this SRFI, each array's domain consists of a rectangular interval $[l_0,u_0)\times[l_1,u_1)\times\cdots\times[l_{d-1},u_{d-1})$, a subset of $\mathbb Z^d$, $d$-tuples of integers. Thus, we introduce a data type called intervals, which encapsulate the cross product of nonempty intervals of exact integers. Specialized variants of arrays are specified to provide portable programs with efficient representations for common use cases.
This SRFI defines utility procedures that create, transform, and consume generators. A generator is simply a procedure with no arguments that works as a source of a series of values. Every time it is called, it yields a value. Generators may be finite or infinite; a finite generator returns an end-of-file object to indicate that it is exhausted. For example, read-char
, read-line
, and read
are generators that generate characters, lines, and objects from the current input port. Generators provide lightweight laziness.
This SRFI defines interfaces to handle timer processes.
This SRFI describes a simple syntax which allows making scheme easier to read for newcomers while keeping the simplicity, generality and elegance of s-expressions. Similar to SRFI 110, SRFI 49 and Python it uses indentation to group expressions. Like SRFI 110 wisp is general and homoiconic.
Different from its predecessors, wisp only uses the absolute minimum of additional syntax-elements which are required for writing and exchanging arbitrary code-structures. As syntax elements it only uses a colon surrounded by whitespace, the period followed by whitespace as first code-character on the line and optional underscores followed by whitespace at the beginning of the line.
It resolves a limitation of SRFI 110 and SRFI 49, both of which force the programmer to use a single argument per line if the arguments to a procedure need to be continued after a procedure-call.
Wisp expressions can include arbitrary s-expressions and as such provide backwards compatibility.
wisp s-exp define : factorial n __ if : zero? n ____ . 1 ____ * n : factorial (- n 1) display : factorial 5 newline (define (factorial n) (if (zero? n) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1))))) (display (factorial 5)) (newline)
Scheme specifies mutable fixed-length strings. We add two procedures string-append!
and string-replace!
which allow the size of the string to change. We also require that the standard Scheme procedures make-string
and string-copy
return variable-size strings.
List queues are mutable ordered collections that can contain any Scheme object. Each list queue is based on an ordinary Scheme list containing the elements of the list queue by maintaining pointers to the first and last pairs of the list. It's cheap to add or remove elements from the front of the list or to add elements to the back, but not to remove elements from the back. List queues are disjoint from other types of Scheme objects.
Scheme currently does not provide immutable pairs corresponding to its existing mutable pairs, although most uses of pairs do not exploit their mutability. The Racket system takes the radical approach of making Scheme's pairs immutable, and providing a minimal library of mutable pairs with procedures named mpair?, mcons, mcar, mcdr, set-mcar!, set-mcdr!
. This SRFI takes the opposite approach of leaving Scheme's pairs unchanged and providing a full set of routines for creating and dealing with immutable pairs. The sample implementation is portable (to systems with SRFI 9) and efficient.
This SRFI provides a library for matching strings with regular expressions described using the SRE "Scheme Regular Expression" notation first introduced by SCSH, and extended heavily by IrRegex.
This proposal is a rewrite of SRFI 67, Compare Procedures, extending it from procedures that represent a total order to procedure bundles that represent one or more of a total order, an equality predicate, and a hash function. By packaging these procedures together, along with a type test predicate, they can be treated as a single item for use in the implementation of data structures.
Sets and bags (also known as multisets) are unordered collections that can contain any Scheme object. Sets enforce the constraint that no two elements can be the same in the sense of the set's associated equality predicate; bags do not.
This is a proposal for environment inquiry, providing human-readable information at run time about the hardware and software configuration on which a Scheme program is being executed. They are mostly based on Common Lisp, with additions from the Posix uname()
system call.
Boxes are objects with a single mutable state. Several Schemes have them, sometimes called cells. A constructor, predicate, accessor, and mutator are provided.
This SRFI describes a set of syntax extensions for Scheme, called sweet-expressions (t-expressions), that has the same descriptive power as s-expressions but is designed to be easier for humans to read. The sweet-expression syntax enables the use of syntactically-meaningful indentation to group expressions (similar to Python), and it builds on the infix and traditional function notation defined in SRFI-105 (curly-infix-expressions). Unlike nearly all past efforts to improve s-expression readability, sweet-expressions are general (the notation is independent from any underlying semantic) and homoiconic (the underlying data structure is clear from the syntax). This notation was developed by the “Readable Lisp S-expressions Project” and can be used for both programs and data.
Sweet-expressions can be considered a set of additional abbreviations, just as 'x
already abbreviates (quote x)
. Sweet-expressions and traditionally formatted s-expressions can be freely mixed; this provides backwards compatibility, simplifies transition, and enables developers to maximize readability. Here is an example of a sweet-expression and its equivalent s-expression (note that a sweet-expression reader would accept either format):
sweet-expression | s-expression |
---|---|
define fibfast(n) ; Typical function notation if {n < 2} ; Indentation, infix {...} n ; Single expr = no new list fibup n 2 1 0 ; Simple function calls | (define (fibfast n) (if (< n 2) n (fibup n 2 1 0))) |
This specifies a reader extension for extended string quasi-literals, including nicer multi-line strings, and enclosed unquoted expressions.
This proposal is related to SRFI-108 (named quasi-literal constructors) and SRFI-107 (XML reader syntax), as they share quite a bit of syntax.
This specifies an extensible reader syntax for named value constructors. A reader prefix is followed by a tag
(an identifier), and then expressions and literal text parameters. The tag can be though of as a class name, and the expression and literal text are arguments to an object constructor call. The reader translates &tag{...}
to a list ($construct$:tag ...)
, where $construct$:tag
is normally bound to a predefined macro.
This propsal depends on SRFI-109 (extended string quasi-literals) (in spite of having a lower number). It also shares quite of bit of syntax with SRFI-107 (XML reader syntax).
We specify a reader extension that reads data in a superset of XML/HTML format, and produces conventional S-expressions. We also suggest a possible semantics interpretation of how these forms may be evaluated to produce XML-node values, but this is non-normative.
This document specifies basic socket interfaces.
Lisp-based languages, like Scheme, are almost the only programming languages in modern use that do not support infix notation. In addition, most languages allow infix expressions to be combined with function call notation of the form f(x)
. This SRFI provides these capabilities, both for developers who already use Scheme and want these conveniences, and also for other developers who may choose to use other languages in part because they miss these conveniences. Scheme currently reserves {
...}
“for possible future extensions to the language”. We propose that {
...}
be used to support “curly-infix-expression” notation as a homoiconic infix abbreviation, as a modification of the Scheme reader. It is an abbreviation in much the same way that 'x is an abbreviation for (quote x).
A curly-infix list introduces a list whose visual presentation can be in infix order instead of prefix order. For example, {n > 5} ⇒ (> n 5), and {a + b + c} ⇒ (+ a b c). By intent, there is no precedence, but e.g., {x + {y * z}} maps cleanly to (+ x (* y z)). Forms with mixed infix operators and other complications have “$nfx$
” prepended to enable later processing, e.g., {4 + 5 * 6} ⇒ ($nfx$ 4 + 5 * 6). Also, inside a curly-infix list (recursively), expressions of the form f(
...)
are simply an abbreviation for (f
...)
.
Note that this is derived from the “readable” project. We intend to later submit at least one additional SRFI that will build on top of this SRFI, but curly-infix-expressions are useful on their own.
This SRFI implements SRFI 103: Library Files as a library. It is useful for working with library files.
This SRFI defines a standard for locating files containing libraries with list-of-symbols library names, for unixes and Windows. It defines a standard for files containing R6RS libraries. It supports different Scheme dialects.
Many Scheme systems provide mechanisms for inspecting the arity of a procedural value, making it a common feature, however there is no standard interface. As a result there is no portable way to observe the arity of a procedure without actually applying it. This SRFI proposes a simple interface that is consistent with existing Scheme systems' facilities and prior proposals.
Random-access lists [1] are a purely functional data structure for representing lists of values. A random-access list may act as a drop in replacement for the usual linear-access pair and list data structures (pair?
, cons
, car
, cdr
), which additionally supports fast index-based addressing and updating (list-ref
, list-set
). The impact is a whole class of purely-functional algorithms expressed in terms of index-based list addressing become feasible compared with their linear-access list counterparts.
This document proposes a library API for purely functional random-access lists consistent with the R6RS [2] base library and list utility standard library [3].
This SRFI introduces a macro, DEFINE-LAMBDA-OBJECT which defines a set of procedures, that is, a group, two constructors, and a predicate. The constructors also make a group of procedures, namely lambda objects. The macro extends DEFINE-RECORD-TYPE (SRFI 9) in being more general but much less general than DEFCLASS (CLOS). The macro has no explicit field accessors and mutators but parent groups, required fields, optional fields, automatic fields, read-write fields, read-only fields, inaccessible hidden fields, immutable virtual fields, and common sharing fields.
Many Scheme programmers have considered records to be one of the most important features missing from the R5RS. The R6RS proposed a record system, but its design has been widely criticized and it was not intended for use in R5RS programs anyway.
This SRFI proposes a better record system for use in R5RS, ERR5RS, and R6RS programs. The syntactic layer of this SRFI's record system is an extension of SRFI 9. The procedural and inspection layers of this SRFI's record system are perfectly compatible with its syntactic layer. This entire SRFI is compatible with the procedural and inspection layers of the R6RS record system, but offers several worthwhile improvements over the R6RS system.
This SRFI specifies the procedure get-environment-variable, which gets the value of the specified environment variable, and the procedure get-environment-variables, which gets an association list of all environment variables.
Over the past ten years, numerous libraries have been specified via the Scheme Requests for Implementation process. Yet until the recent ratification of the Revised6 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme, there has been no standardized way of distributing or relying upon library code. Now that such a library system exists, there is a real need to organize these existing SRFI libraries so that they can be portably referenced.
This SRFI is designed to facilitate the writing and distribution of code that relies on SRFI libraries. It identifies a subset of existing SRFIs that specify features amenable to provision (and possibly implementation) as libraries (SRFI Libraries) and proposes a naming convention for this subset so that these libraries may be referred to by name or by number.
This SRFI specifies a set of procedures and macros presenting a uniform interface sufficient to host the SLIB Scheme Library system.
Sorting and Merging are useful operations deserving a common API.
In the coding of numerial calculations in latent-typed languages it is good practice to assure that those calculations are using the intended number system. The most common number systems for programmatic calculations are the integers, reals, and complexes. This SRFI introduces 14 real-only and 3 integer-only variants of R5RS procedures to facilitate numerical type checking and declaration.
The syntactic abstraction system described here extends the R5RS macro system with support for writing low-level macros in a high-level style, with automatic syntax checking, input destructuring, output restructuring, maintenance of lexical scoping and referential transparency (hygiene), and support for controlled identifier capture, with constant expansion overhead. Because it does not require literals, including quoted lists or vectors, to be copied or even traversed, it preserves sharing and cycles within and among the constants of a program. It also supports source-object correlation, i.e., the maintenance of ties between the original source code and expanded output, allowing implementations to provide source-level support for debuggers and other tools.
This SRFI introduces ALAMBDA and ALAMBDA*, each of which has two modes of operation:
This SRFI specifies an extension to the R5RS ports that supports several useful features: binary I/O and text I/O, bulk I/O, file opening attributes, and bidirectional ports. Binary I/O is provided through byte ports which are ports whose fundamental I/O unit is an 8 bit byte. Because characters can be encoded with bytes using a character encoding such as ISO 8859-1, UTF-8, and UTF-16BE, any byte port is also a character port (a port that supports the character level I/O of R5RS). A byte port's character encoding and various other attributes are specified when the port is opened. Because reasonable defaults exist, these attributes are specified using a named optional parameter syntax. All procedures which have the same name as in R5RS are compatible with R5RS but may provide additional functionality.
This SRFI specifies the procedure make-table
, a hash table constructor compatible with SRFI 69 (Basic hash tables). The procedure make-table
allows various parameters of the hash table to be specified with optional named parameters when it is constructed. These parameters are: the initial size, the minimum and maximum load factor, the key equivalence function, the key hashing function, whether the references to the keys are weak, and similarly for the values. By using optional named parameters, as specified in SRFI 89 (Optional positional and named parameters), the constructor's API can be easily extended in a backward compatible way by other SRFIs and Scheme implementations.
This SRFI specifies the define*
and lambda*
special forms. These forms extend the R5RS define
and lambda
special forms to simplify the use of optional positional and named parameters. Optional positional parameters, optional named parameters and required named parameters are covered by this SRFI. The formal parameter list syntax specified in this SRFI is different from the syntax used by Common Lisp and the DSSSL languages but nevertheless offers similar functionality and a nicer syntax. Formal parameter lists which conform to the R5RS syntax have the same meaning as in R5RS.
This SRFI defines keyword objects, a data type similar to Scheme symbols. Keyword objects have the same lexical syntax as symbols but they must end in a colon. Moreover keyword objects are self-evaluating. Procedures for converting between strings and keyword objects (string->keyword
and keyword->string
) and a type predicate (keyword?
) are defined. Finally this SRFI specifies the changes to the Scheme lexical syntax required to accomodate keywords.
This SRFI proposes an extension to the case
syntax to allow the =>
clauses as in cond
.
Unlike the values
/call-with-values
mechanism of R5RS, this SRFI uses an explicit representation for multiple return values as a single value, namely a procedure. Decomposition of multiple values is done by simple application. Each of the two macros, mu
and nu
, evaluates to a procedure that takes one procedure argument. The mu
and nu
can be compared with lambda
. While lambda
expression that consists of <formals> and <body> requires some actual arguments later when the evaluated lambda
expression is called, mu
and nu
expressions that consist of <expression>s corresponding to actual arguments of lambda
require <formals> and <body>, that is, an evaluated lambda
expression, later when the evaluated mu
and nu
expressions are called.
This SRFI also introduces new let
-syntax depending on mu
and nu
to manipulate multiple values, alet
and alet*
that are compatible with let
and let*
of R5RS in single value bindings. They also have a binding form making use of values
and call-with-values
to handle multiple values. In addition, they have several new binding forms for useful functions such as escape, recursion, etc.
This SRFI defines two related equivalence predicates that are recursive, not just partial recursive: they terminate on all arguments. One of these predicates, equiv?
, is consistent with the equal?
procedure described in the R5RS: Whenever equal?
terminates, equiv?
returns the same value as equal?
.
This SRFI proposes a social convention to allow programmers to easily create short, simple Scheme symbols which are guaranteed to be universally unique: No other programmer also following this SRFI will accidentally create a symbol eq? to yours.
Universally unique symbols are useful to identify standards, languages, libraries, types, classes, and other resources.
The module system presented here is designed to let programmers share libraries, i.e., code that is intended to be incorporated into larger programs, and especially into programs that use library code from multiple sources. The module system supports macro definitions within modules, allows macro exports, and distinguishes the phases in which definitions and imports are needed. This SRFI defines a standard notation for libraries, a semantics for library expansion and execution, and a simple format for sharing libraries.
This SRFI augments SRFI 81 (Port I/O) by allowing ports to be constructed from streams as described in SRFI 80 (Stream I/O).
This SRFI defines an I/O layer similar in nature to the ports subsystem in R5RS, and provides conventional, imperative buffered input and output.
The layer architecture is similar to the upper three layers of the I/O subsystem in The Standard ML Basis Library.
In particular, the subsystem fulfills the following requirements:
It builds on the Primitive I/O layer specified in SRFI 79 (Primitive I/O).
This SRFI defines an I/O layer for lazy, mostly functional buffered streams.
The layer architecture is similar to the upper three layers of the I/O subsystem in The Standard ML Basis Library.
In particular, this layer provides
It builds on the Primitive I/O layer specified in SRFI 79 (Primitive I/O).
This SRFI defines a simple, primitive I/O subsystem for Scheme that is intended to function as the lowest layer of a more comprehensive suite of I/O layers. It provides unbuffered I/O, and is close to what a typical operating system offers. Thus, its interface is suitable for implementing high-throughput and zero-copy I/O.
The Primitive I/O layer also allows clients to implement custom data sources and sinks via a simple interface.
Moreover, this SRFI defines a condition hierarchy specifying common I/O-related exceptional situations.
The Primitive I/O layer only handles blocking-I/O. Non-blocking and selective I/O is left for another SRFI.
This I/O layer was designed in conjunction with two other layers that can be built on top of it: SRFI 80 (Stream I/O) and SRFI 81 (Port I/O).
A simple mechanism is defined for testing Scheme programs. As a most primitive example, the expression
(check (+ 1 1) => 3)evaluates the expression
(+ 1 1)
and compares the result with the expected result 3 provided after the syntactic keyword =>
. Then the outcome of this comparison is reported in human-readable form by printing a message of the form (+ 1 1) => 2 ; *** failed *** ; expected result: 3Moreover, the outcome of any executed check is recorded in a global state counting the number of correct and failed checks and storing the first failed check. At the end of a file, or at any other point, the user can print a summary using
check-report
. In addition to the simple test above, it is also possible to execute a parametric sequence of checks. Syntactically, this takes the form of an eager comprehension in the sense of SRFI 42 [5]. For example,
(check-ec (:range e 100) (:let x (expt 2.0 e)) (= (+ x 1) x) => #f (e x))This statement runs the variable
e
through {0..99} and for each binding defines x
as (expt 2.0 e)
. Then it is checked if (+ x 1)
is equal to x
, and it is expected that this is not the case (i.e. expected value is #f
). The trailing (e x)
tells the reporting mechanism to print the values of both e
and x
in case of a failed check. The output could look like this: (let ((e 53) (x 9007199254740992.0)) (= (+ x 1) x)) => #t ; *** failed *** ; expected result: #fThe specification of bindings to report,
(e x)
in the example, is optional but very informative. Other features of this SRFI are: equal?
). Scheme's arithmetic system was designed to allow a wide variety of implementations. After many years of implementation experience, however, most implementations now fall into a small number of categories, and the benefits of continued experimentation no longer justify the confusion and portability problems that have resulted from giving implementations so much freedom in this area. Moreover, the R5RS generic arithmetic is difficult to implement as efficiently as purely fixnum or purely flonum arithmetic. (Fixnum arithmetic is typically limited-precision integer arithmetic implemented using one or more representations that may be especially efficient on the executing machine; flonum arithmetic is typically limited-precision floating-point arithmetic using one or more representations that may be especially efficient on the executing machine.)
This SRFI is an effort to extend and clarify the R5RS arithmetic to make it more portable, more comprehensive, and enable faster programs.
Furthermore, one of us (Sperber) has argued that Scheme's arithmetic requires radical overhaul. The other (Clinger) agrees that revisions are needed. Whether these revisions qualify as radical is best left to the judgement of individual readers.
This SRFI proposes to revise section 6.2 ("Numbers") of R5RS by:
eqv?
to behave more sensibly with inexact numbers This SRFI describes abstractions for creating new data types representing records - data structures with named fields. This SRFI comes in four parts:
Unicode is a widespread universal character code that supports most of the world's (natural) languages. The extensions to Scheme specified in this SRFI concern the support of Unicode in Scheme's character, string, and symbol datatypes. This SRFI does not (fully) specify how I/O of Unicode data is performed or how Scheme source code is encoded in files; these aspects are left for other SRFIs to specify.
This SRFI defines a set of procedures for creating, accessing, and manipulating octet-addressed blocks of binary data, in short, blobs. The SRFI provides access primitives for fixed-length integers of arbitrary size, with specified endianness, and a choice of unsigned and two's complement representations.
Many Scheme implementations support exact arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic as well as exact rational number computation. This SRFI extends the rational numbers of R5RS by adding two rational infinities (1/0, -1/0).
With infinities added to the number system we find that division by zero "works". It lets initialization of variables precede bounds checks and gives flexibility in placement of those checks.
This SRFI describes a procedural macro proposal for Scheme with the following features:
We argue that conventional hygiene algorithms may lead to accidental variable capture errors in procedural macros. We propose an improved algorithm that avoids these problems.
We specify a reflective tower of arbitrary height, and propose a refinement of lexical scoping that takes into account the phase of use of an identifier in determining its meaning.
In the current proposal, the syntax-case
form is expressible as a macro in terms of a simpler set of primitives and is specified as library syntax.
The primitive interface for manipulating compound syntax objects consists of procedures rather than special forms. In particular, the traditional abstractions car
, cdr
, cons
, ...
can be used on syntactic data.
The reference implementation documents a fast imperative hygiene algorithm that is eager and linear in expression size.
A primitive make-capturing-identifier
is provided for intentional variable capture and for building expansion-time fluid binding constructs.
This SRFI is a proposal for extending let
, let*
, and letrec
for receiving multiple values. The syntactic extension is fully compatible with the existing syntax. It is the intention that single-value bindings, i.e. (let ((var expr)) ...)
, and multiple-value binding can be mixed freely and conveniently.
The most simple form of the new syntax is best explained by an example:
(define (quo-rem x y) (values (quotient x y) (remainder x y))) (define (quo x y) (let ((q r (quo-rem x y))) q))
The procedure quo-rem
delivers two values to its continuation. These values are received as q
and r
in the let
-expression of the procedure quo
. In other words, the syntax of let
is extended such that several variables can be specified---and these variables receive the values delivered by the expression (quo-rem x y)
.
The syntax of let
is further extended to cases in which a rest argument receives the list of all residual values. Again by example,
(let (((values y1 y2 . y3+) (foo x))) body)In this example,
values
is a syntactic keyword indicating the presence of multiple values to be received, and y1
, y2
, and y3+
, resp., are variables bound to the first value, the second value, and the list of the remaining values, resp., as produced by (foo x)
. The syntactic keyword values
allows receiving all values as in (let (((values . xs) (foo x))) body)
. It also allows receiving no values at all as in (let (((values) (for-each foo list))) body)
.A common application of binding multiple values is decomposing data structures into their components. This mechanism is illustrated in its most primitive form as follows: The procedure uncons
(defined below) decomposes a pair x
into its car and its cdr and delivers them as two values to its continuation. Then an extended let
can receive these values:
(let ((car-x cdr-x (uncons x))) (foo car-x cdr-x))
Of course, for pairs this method is probably neither faster nor clearer than using the procedures car
and cdr
. However, for data structures doing substantial work upon decomposition this is different: Extracting the element of highest priority from a priority queue, while at the same time constructing the residual queue, can both be more efficient and more convenient than doing both operations independently. In fact, the quo-rem
example illustrates this point already as both quotient and remainder are probably computed by a common exact division algorithm. (And often caching is used to avoid executing this algorithm twice as often as needed.)
As the last feature of this SRFI, a mechanism is specified to store multiple values in heap-allocated data structures. For this purpose, values->list
and values->vector
construct a list (a vector, resp.) storing all values delivered by evaluating their argument expression. Note that these operations cannot be procedures.
This SRFI proposes text to replace section 6.2 "Numbers" of R5RS in order to extend its capabilities, correct errors in its specification, make it more explicit about limitations of precision and magnitude, and improve portability between implementations. More specifically, this new text:
This SRFI defines basic hash tables. Hash tables are widely recognised as a fundamental data structure for a wide variety of applications. A hash table is a data structure that:
This SRFI aims to accomplish these goals:
This SRFI defines a comprehensive I/O subsystem for Scheme with three layers, where each layer is built on top of the one below it:
The layer architecture is similar to the upper three layers of the I/O subsystem in The Standard ML Basis Library.
In particular, the subsystem provides
The subsystem does not provide
However, all of these could be added on top of one or several of the layers specified in this SRFI.
This SRFI can be seen as an extension of the standard procedures =
, <
, char<?
etc. of R5RS -- or even as a replacement. The primary design aspect in this SRFI is the separation of representing a total order and using it. For representing the order, we have chosen for truly 3-way comparisons. For using it we provide an extensive set of operations, each of which accepts a procedure used for comparison. Since these compare procedures are often optional, comparing built-in types is as convenient as R5RS , sometimes more convenient: For example, testing if the integer index i lies in the integer range {0, ...
, n -
1} can be written as (<=/<? 0 i n)
, implicitly invoking default-compare
.
As soon as new total orders are required, the infrastructure provided by this SRFI is far more convenient and often even more efficient than building each total order from scratch.
Moreover, in case Scheme users and implementors find this mechanism useful and adopt it, the benefit of having a uniform interface to total orders to be used in data structures will manifest itself. Most concretely, a new sorting procedure in the spirit of this SRFI would have the interface (my-sort [ compare ] xs)
, using default-compare
if the optional compare was not provided. Then my-sort
could be defined using the entire infrastructure of this SRFI: Efficient 2- and 3-way branching, testing for chains and pairwise inequality, min/max, and general order statistics.
This SRFI defines a set of procedures for creating, accessing, and manipulating uniform vectors of octets.
The define-immutable
form defines an identifier whose value never changes.
The expression part of the definition is evaluated lazily: it is not evaluated unless and until the identifier is evaluated. This permits an immutable definition to use other definitions in more ways than is possible when using define
in internal definitions.
A series of immutable definitions have simple semantics, making them easy to program and understand.
(let () (define-immutable x (+ z 5)) (define-immutable y (/ 100 4)) (define-immutable z (add-10 y)) (define-immutable add-10 (add-n 10)) (define-immutable (add-n n) (lambda (x) (+ n x))) x) => 40
This defines an API for writing test suites, to make it easy to portably test Scheme APIs, libraries, applications, and implementations. A test suite is a collection of test cases that execute in the context of a test-runner. This specifications also supports writing new test-runners, to allow customization of reporting and processing the result of running test suites.
The SRFI, which is to supersede SRFI-47, "Array",
SRFI-58 gives a read/write invariant syntax for the homogeneous and heterogeneous arrays described here.
This SRFI proposes a simple extension to Scheme's lexical syntax that allows individual S-expressions to be made into comments, ignored by the reader. This contrasts with the standard Lisp semicolon comments, which make the reader ignore the remainder of the line, and the slightly less common block comments, as SRFI 30 defines: both of these mechanisms comment out slices of text, not S-expressions.
This SRFI proposes an extension to the cond
syntax to allow a more general clause, one that allows binding the results of tests as in the =>
clauses and user-defined meaning of the success & failure of tests.
Treating integers as two's-complement strings of bits is an arcane but important domain of computer science. It is used for:
A vicinity is a descriptor for a place in the file system. Vicinities hide from the programmer the concepts of host, volume, directory, and version. Vicinities express only the concept of a file environment where a file name can be resolved to a file in a system independent manner.
All of these procedures are file-system dependent. Use of these vicinity procedures can make programs file-system independent.
SRFI-47 and its successor SRFI-63 provide both homogeneous numeric and heterogeneous multidimensional arrays which subsume Scheme vectors. The notation presented here builds upon Common-Lisp array syntax to represent heterogeneous arrays; and introduces a new Scheme-based notation for denoting homogeneous numeric arrays.
We describe a syntax for defining record types. A predicate, constructor, and field accessors and modifiers may be specified for each record type. We also introduce a syntax for declaring record type schemes, representing families of record types that share a set of field labels. A polymorphic predicate and polymorphic field accessors and modifiers may be specified for each record type scheme. A syntax is provided for constructing records by field label, for in-place and for functional record update, and for composing records.
This SRFI extends Scheme with procedures to read and write binary data to and from ports, including utility procedures for writing various integer and floating point values in both big and little endian formats. Predicates are provided to test if binary I/O is allowed on a port, along with new procedures for creating such ports.
This SRFI specifies an extremely simple facility for making an extension or library available to a Scheme toplevel environment.
This SRFI introduces the CAT procedure that converts any object to a string. It takes one object as the first argument and accepts a variable number of optional arguments, unlike the procedure called FORMAT.
This SRFI provides a portable framework for writing complex high-level macros that perform nontrivial computations during expansion.
This SRFI describes how to modify the Revised Report (R5RS) in order to enable conforming implementations to use an extended character set such as (but not limited to) Unicode.
Changes to some requirements of the report are recommended. Currently, the Revised Report contains requirements which are difficult or impossible to satisfy with some extended character sets.
New required procedures are proposed, specified, and included in the reference implementation. These procedures enable portable Scheme programs to manipulate Scheme source texts and source data accurately, even in implementations using extended character sets.
This SRFI concludes with some suggestions for implementors interested in providing good Unicode support, using these suggestions to illustrate how the proposed changes to the Revised Report can "play out" in Unicode-based Scheme.
This SRFI does not attempt to provide a comprehensive library for global text processing. For example, one issue in global text processing is the need for linguistically-sensitive, locale-sensitive procedures for sorting strings. Such procedures are beyond the scope of this SRFI. On the other hand, by making Scheme compatible with extended character sets, this SRFI is a step in the direction of permitting global text processing standard libraries to be developed in a form portable across all conforming implementations.
This SRFI does not propose that implementations be required to support Unicode or any other extended character set. It does not specify a representation for Unicode characters or strings. It does revise the specifications of the report so that char?
values may be Unicode (or other) characters.
The reference implementation included should prove to be easily ported to and effective for all ASCII-only implementations and for many implementations using an 8-bit character set which is an extension of ASCII (it will require very minor modifications for each particular implementation). Other implementations may need to use a different implementation.
This SRFI introduces the rest-values
procedure which has three modes of operation:
and eight macros which additionally check the rest arguments that are returned by rest-values
.
This SRFI describes an interface for calling C functions from Scheme, calling Scheme functions from C, and allocating storage in the Scheme heap. Scheme manages stub functions in C that negotiate between the calling conventions of Scheme and C and the memory allocation policies of both worlds.
The following facilities are available for interfacing between Scheme and C:
The interface is closely based on that of Scheme 48 and scsh.
This SRFI descibes a new syntax for Scheme, called I-expressions, whith equal descriptive power as S-expressions. The syntax uses indentation to group expressions, and has no special cases for semantic constructs of the language. It can be used both for program and data input.
It also allows mixing S-expressions and I-expressions freely, giving the programmer the ability to layout the code as to maximize readability.
This document specifies Format Strings, a method of interpreting a Scheme string which contains a number of format directives that are replaced with other string data according to the semantics of each directive. This SRFI extends SRFI-28 in being more generally useful but is less general than advanced format strings in that it does not allow, aside from ~F, for controlled positioning of text within fields.
This SRFI proposes two extensions to the R5RS1 syntax-rules
pattern language: the first allows syntax-rules
macros to generate macros, where the macro-generated macros use ellipsis that is not used by the macro-generating macros; the second allows for 'tail patterns.'
Lazy evaluation is traditionally simulated in Scheme using delay
and force
. However, these primitives are not powerful enough to express a large class of lazy algorithms that are iterative. Indeed, it is folklore in the Scheme community that typical iterative lazy algorithms written using delay
and force
will often require unbounded memory.
Although varous modifications of delay
and force
had been proposed to resolve this problem (see e.g., the SRFI-40 discussion list) they all fail some of the benchmarks provided below. To our knowledge, the current SRFI provides the first exhaustive solution to this problem.
As motivation, we first explain how the usual laziness encoding using only delay
and force
will break the iterative behavior of typical algorithms that would have been properly tail-recursive in a true lazy language, causing the computation to require unbounded memory.
The problem is then resolved by introducing a set of three operations:
{which allow the programmer to succinctly express lazy algorithms while retaining bounded space behavior in cases that are properly tail-recursive. A general recipe for using these primitives is provided. An additional procedurelazy
,delay
,force
}
{eager}
is provided for the construction of eager promises in cases where efficiency is a concern.Although this SRFI redefines delay
and force
, the extension is conservative in the sense that the semantics of the subset {delay
, force
} in isolation (i.e., as long as the program does not use lazy
) agrees with that in R5RS. In other words, no program that uses the R5RS definitions of delay and force will break if those definition are replaced by the SRFI-45 definitions of delay and force.
A Collections API which defines a common naming scheme and set of operations for creating, accessing, and manipulating common datastructures in Scheme. The API defines accessors, a common protocol for value access via generic and specific enumeration, and functions for inter-datastructure cooperation. Finally, a concrete specification of a compliant set of operators for the standard Scheme heterogenous datastructures (lists and vectors) and for the homogeneous Scheme string is provided.
This SRFI proposes a comprehensive and complete library of vector operations accompanied by a freely available and complete reference implementation. The reference implementation is unencumbered by copyright, and useable with no modifications on any Scheme system that is R5RS-compliant. It also provides several hooks for implementation-specific optimization as well.
Because this SRFI is more of a library or module specification than a request for additions to readers or any other internal implementation detail, in an implementation that supports a module or structure or package or library or unit (et cetera) systems, these procedures should be contained in a module / structure / package / library / unit called vector-lib
.
This SRFI defines a modular and portable mechanism for eager comprehensions extending the algorithmic language Scheme [R5RS]. An eager comprehension is a convenient notation for one or more nested or parallel loops generating a sequence of values, and accumulating this sequence into a result.
Streams, sometimes called lazy lists, are a sequential data structure containing elements computed only on demand. A stream is either null or is a pair with a stream in its cdr. Since elements of a stream are computed only when accessed, streams can be infinite. Once computed, the value of a stream element is cached in case it is needed again.
Streams without memoization were first described by Peter Landin in 1965. Memoization became accepted as an essential feature of streams about a decade later. Today, streams are the signature data type of functional programming languages such as Haskell.
This Scheme Request for Implementation describes two libraries for operating on streams: a canonical set of stream primitives and a set of procedures and syntax derived from those primitives that permits convenient expression of stream operations. They rely on facilities provided by R6RS, including libraries, records, and error reporting. To load both stream libraries, say:
(import (streams))
Along with higher-order functions, one of the hallmarks of functional programming is lazy evaluation. A primary manifestation of lazy evaluation is lazy lists, generally called streams by Scheme programmers, where evaluation of a list element is delayed until its value is needed.
The literature on lazy evaluation distinguishes two styles of laziness, called even and odd. Odd style streams are ubiquitous among Scheme programs and can be easily encoded with the Scheme primitives delay and force defined in R5RS. However, the even style delays evaluation in a manner closer to that of traditional lazy languages such as Haskell and avoids an "off by one" error that is symptomatic of the odd style.
This SRFI defines the stream data type in the even style, some essential procedures and syntax that operate on streams, and motivates our choice of the even style. A companion SRFI 41 Stream Library provides additional procedures and syntax which make for more convenient processing of streams and shows several examples of their use.
This SRFI defines parameter objects, the procedure make-parameter
to create parameter objects and the parameterize
special form to dynamically bind parameter objects. In the dynamic environment, each parameter object is bound to a cell containing the value of the parameter. When a procedure is called the called procedure inherits the dynamic environment from the caller. The parameterize
special form allows the binding of a parameter object to be changed for the dynamic extent of its body.
This SRFI proposes (write-with-shared-structure)
and (read-with-shared-structure)
, procedures for writing and reading external representations of data containing shared structure. These procedures implement a proposed standard external notation for data containing shared structure.
This SRFI permits but does not require replacing the standard (write)
and (read)
functions. These functions may be implemented without the overhead in time and space required to detect and specify shared structure.
An implementation conforms to this SRFI if it provides procedures named (write-with-shared-structure)
and (read-with-shared-structure)
, which produce and read the same notation as produced by the reference implementation. It may also provide (read/ss)
and (write/ss)
, equivalent functions with shorter names.
Many operating systems make the set of argument strings used to invoke a program available (often following the program name string in an array called argv). Most programs need to parse and process these argument strings in one way or another. This SRFI describes a set of procedures that support processing program arguments according to POSIX and GNU C Library Reference Manual guidelines.
This SRFI specifies a set of condition types for I/O errors. The condition types are defined in terms of SRFI 35. Moreover, this SRFI requires a Scheme system implementing it to raise exceptions in the sense of SRFI 34 for errors occurring during the execution of the R5RS I/O operations.
The SRFI defines constructs for creating and inspecting condition types and values. A condition value encapsulates information about an exceptional situation, or exception. This SRFI also defines a few basic condition types.
This SRFI defines exception-handling and exception-raising constructs for Scheme, including
with-exception-handler
procedure and a guard
form for installing exception-handling procedures, raise
procedure for invoking the current exception handler. This SRFI is based on (withdrawn) SRFI 12: Exception Handling by William Clinger, R. Kent Dybvig, Matthew Flatt, and Marc Feeley.
R5RS Scheme has no utilities for performing bitwise logical operations on integers or bitstrings, which is a problem for authors of portable code. This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of these functions; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec in terms of a set of seven core operators. The reference implementation is
The precise semantics of these operators is almost never an issue. A consistent, portable set of names and parameter conventions, however, is. Hence this SRFI.
Current Scheme sorting packages are, every one of them, surprisingly bad. I've designed the API for a full-featured sort toolkit, which I propose as an SRFI. The spec comes with 1200 lines of high-quality reference code: tightly written, highly commented, portable code, available for free. Implementors want this code. It's better than what you have.
We propose the implementation of a special form called rec
. This form is a generalization and combination of the forms rec
and named-lambda
of [Clinger1985]. It allows the simple and non-imperative construction of self-referential expressions. As an important special case, it extends the A. Church form lambda
such that it allows the direct definition of recursive procedures without using further special forms like let
or letrec
, without using advanced constructions like the H. B. Curry combinator and, unlike define
, without introducing variable bindings into the external environment.
This SRFI extends R5RS by possibly nested, multi-line comments. Multi-line comments start with #|
and end with |#
.
This document specifies an interface to retrieving and displaying locale sensitive messages. A Scheme program can register one or more translations of templated messages, and then write Scheme code that can transparently retrieve the appropriate message for the locale under which the Scheme system is running.
This document specifies Format Strings, a method of interpreting a Scheme string which contains a number of escape sequences that are replaced with other string data according to the semantics of each sequence.
This document specifies an interface to sources of random bits, or "random sources" for brevity. In particular, there are three different ways to use the interface, with varying demands on the quality of the source and the amount of control over the production process:
(random-integer
n)
produces the next random integer in {0, ..., n-1} and (random-real)
produces the next random real number between zero and one. The details of how these random values are produced may not be very relevant, as long as they appear to be sufficiently random. Once random sources provide the infrastructure to obtain random bits, these can be used to construct other random deviates. Most important are floating point numbers of various distributions and random discrete structures, such as permutations or graphs. As there is an essentially unlimited number of such objects (with limited use elsewhere), we do not include them in this SRFI. In other words, this SRFI is not about making all sorts of random objects---it is about obtaining random bits in a portable, flexible, reliable, and efficient way.
When programming in functional style, it is frequently necessary to specialize some of the parameters of a multi-parameter procedure. For example, from the binary operation cons
one might want to obtain the unary operation (lambda (x) (cons 1 x))
. This specialization of parameters is also known as "partial application", "operator section" or "projection".
The mechanism proposed here allows to write this sort of specialization in a simple and compact way. The mechanism is best explained by a few examples:
(cut cons (+ a 1) <>) | is the same as | (lambda (x2) (cons (+ a 1) x2)) |
(cut list 1 <> 3 <> 5) | is the same as | (lambda (x2 x4) (list 1 x2 3 x4 5)) |
(cut list) | is the same as | (lambda () (list)) |
(cut list 1 <> 3 <...>) | is the same as | (lambda (x2 . xs) (apply list 1 x2 3 xs)) |
(cut <> a b) | is the same as | (lambda (f) (f a b)) |
As you see, the macro cut
specializes some of the parameters of its first argument. The parameters that are to show up as formal variables of the result are indicated by the symbol <>
, pronouced as "slot". In addition, the symbol <...>
, pronounced as "rest-slot", matches all residual arguments of a variable argument procedure. As you can see from the last example above, the first argument can also be a slot, as one should expect in Scheme.
In addition to cut
, there is a variant called cute
(a mnemonic for "cut
with evaluated non-slots") which evaluates the non-slot expressions at the time the procedure is specialized, not at the time the specialized procedure is called. For example,
(cute cons (+ a 1) <>) | is the same as | (let ((a1 (+ a 1))) (lambda (x2) (cons a1 x2))) |
As you see from comparing this example with the first example above, the cute
-variant will evaluate (+ a 1)
once, while the cut
-variant will evaluate it during every invokation of the resulting procedure.
The mechanism proposed in this SRFI allows specializing any subset of the variables of a procedure. The result can be of fixed arity or of variable arity. The mechanism does not allow permutation, omission, duplication or any other processing of the arguments; for this it is necessary to write to use a different mechanism such as lambda
.
A core set of procedures for creating and manipulating heterogeneous multidimensional arrays is proposed. The design is consistent with the rest of Scheme and independent of other container data types. It provides easy sharing of parts of an array as other arrays without copying, encouraging a declarative style of programming.
The specification is based on an original contribution by Alan Bawden in 1993.
This document specifies a proper extension to Scheme which allows define-syntax forms to appear in those places where local definitions can appear (R5RS, 5.2.2). A corresponding letrec-variant is described.
A mechanism is proposed to allow Scheme code to report errors and abort execution. The proposed mechanism is already implemented in several Scheme systems and can be implemented, albeit imperfectly, in any R5RS conforming Scheme.
This SRFI describes basic prerequisites for running Scheme programs as Unix scripts in a uniform way. Specifically, it describes:
This SRFI defines the following multithreading datatypes for Scheme
It also defines a mechanism to handle exceptions and some multithreading exception datatypes.
This SRFI presents an object system to define classes, generic functions as well as to support some level of introspection. This object system is based on Meroon-V3 which is itself inspired by CLOS. Meroon-V3 is distributed and used since 1992.
Points in time are represented as the number of seconds (with nanosecond precision) since "the epoch," a zero point in time. Several standard variants are defined, including UTC (universal coordinated time), TAI (international atomic time), and monotonic time. A point in time can also be represented as a Julian Day or Modified Julian Day number. Time durations, including time spent in a process or thread, are defined. Conversion routines are provided. The procedure CURRENT-TIME queries the current time in a specified variant, with a system-dependent resolution. Procedures for time arithmetic and time comparisons are also provided.
A date is a representation of a point in time in the Gregorian calendar, a 24 hour clock (with nanosecond precision) and a time zone offset from UTC. Procedures for converting between time and dates are provided, as well as for reading and writing string representations of dates.
This SRFI defines the following multithreading datatypes for Scheme
It also defines a mechanism to handle exceptions and some multithreading exception datatypes.
This is a proposal to allow procedure calls that evaluate to the "value of a location" to be used to set the value of the location, when used as the first operand of set!
.For example:
(set! (car x) (car y))becomes equivalent to
(set-car! x (car y))
Many programming languages have the concept of an lvalue. that is an "expression" that "evaluates" to a location, and which can appear on the left-hand-side of an assignment. Common Lisp has a related concept of "generalized variables" which can be used in setf
and some other special forms. However, the Common Lisp concept is based on the idea of compile-time recognition of special "location-producing" functions; this does not seem to be in the "spirit of Scheme".
This SRFI proposes an extension of set!
so that it provides similar functionality as Common Lisp's setf
, except that the updater is associated with a procedure value, rather than a name.
CASE-LAMBDA, a syntax for procedures with a variable number of arguments, is introduced.
FLUID-LET, a binding syntax for dynamic scoping, is introduced.
The ability to efficiently represent and manipulate sets of characters is an unglamorous but very useful capability for text-processing code -- one that tends to pop up in the definitions of other libraries. Hence it is useful to specify a general substrate for this functionality early. This SRFI defines a general library that provides this functionality.
It is accompanied by a reference implementation for the spec. The reference implementation is fairly efficient, straightforwardly portable, and has a "free software" copyright. The implementation is tuned for "small" 7 or 8 bit character types, such as ASCII or Latin-1; the data structures and algorithms would have to be altered for larger 16 or 32 bit character types such as Unicode -- however, the specs have been carefully designed with these larger character types in mind.
Several forthcoming SRFIs can be defined in terms of this one:
read-line
) R5RS Scheme has an impoverished set of string-processing utilities, which is a problem for authors of portable code. This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of string-processing procedures; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec. The reference implementation is
The routines in this SRFI are backwards-compatible with the string-processing routines of R5RS.
The SRFI defines exception-handling constructs for Scheme, including
This SRFI requires a Scheme implementation to raise an exception whenever an error is to be signaled or whenever the system determines that evaluation cannot proceed in a manner consistent with the semantics of Scheme. However, this SRFI does not define the information to be supplied by an implementation for each possible kind of exception; such a specification is left open for future SRFIs.
The SRFI introduces syntactic forms LET-VALUES and LET*-VALUES that bind the values of expressions that return multiple values.
The present SRFI proposes an extensible external representation of Scheme values, a notational convention for future SRFIs. This SRFI adds #,(
as a new token and extends production rules of the grammar for a Scheme reader. The #,()
form can be used for example to denote values that do not have a convenient printed representation, as well for conditional code compilation. It is proposed that future SRFIs that contain new read syntax for values use the #,()
notation with an appropriate tag symbol.
As a particular example and the reference implementation for the #,()
convention, this SRFI describes an interpretation of the #,()
external form as a read-time application.
This SRFI describes syntax for creating new data types, called record types. A predicate, constructor, and field accessors and modifiers are defined for each record type. Each new record type is distinct from all existing types, including other record types and Scheme's predefined types.
The only mechanism that R5RS provides for binding identifiers to the values of a multiple-valued expression is the primitive call-with-values
. This SRFI proposes a more concise, more readable syntax for creating such bindings.
This SRFI describes a configuration language to be used for specifying the set of Scheme features or extensions required to run a program. In addition to a list of required features, a program may also contain Scheme code to be used only when a particular feature or combination of features is available.
The configuration language is entirely distinct from Scheme; it is neither embedded in Scheme nor includes Scheme as a subset.
Scheme's i/o primitives are extended by adding three new procedures that
The named-let incarnation of the let
form has two slight inconsistencies with the define
form. As defined, the let
form makes no accommodation for rest arguments, an issue of functionality and consistency. As defined, the let
form does not accommodate signature-style syntax, an issue of aesthetics and consistency. Both issues are addressed here in a manner which is compatible with the traditional let
form but for minor extensions.
This SRFI describes a set of datatypes for vectors whose elements are of the same numeric type (signed or unsigned exact integer or inexact real of a given precision). These datatypes support operations analogous to the Scheme vector type, but they are distinct datatypes. An external representation is specified which must be supported by the read
and write
procedures and by the program parser (i.e. programs can contain references to literal homogeneous vectors).
This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of procedures for manipulating lists as sets; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec. The reference implementation is
Be aware that these procedures are inherently O(n^2) in the lengths of their parameter lists - serious set operations on large lists should use alternate techniques.
Like an ordinary AND, an AND-LET* special form evaluates its arguments -- expressions -- one after another in order, till the first one that yields #f. Unlike AND, however, a non-#f result of one expression can be bound to a fresh variable and used in the subsequent expressions. AND-LET* is a cross-breed between LET* and AND.
R5RS Scheme has an impoverished set of list-processing utilities, which is a problem for authors of portable code. This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of list-processing procedures; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec. The reference implementation is
It is desirable that programs which depend on additions to standard Scheme name those additions. SRFIs provide the specifications of these additions ("features"), and SRFI 0 provides the means to actually check that these features are present in the Scheme system by means of the cond-expand
construct. It is anticipated that there will be two main classes of features:
("Reader syntax" refers to aspects of the syntax described by the grammars in the Scheme reports.)
The former class of features will probably include most SRFIs, exemplified by the list library specified in SRFI 1. The latter class includes Unicode source code support and different kinds of parentheses.
Control over the presence of individual features will vary over different Scheme systems. A given feature may be absent or provided by default in some Scheme systems and in others some mechanism (such as an "import" clause in the code or a program configuration file, a command line option, a dependency declaration in a module definition, etc.) will be required for the feature to be present in the system.
Moreover, in some systems a given feature may be in effect throughout the entire program if it is in effect anywhere at all. Other systems may have more precise mechanisms to control the scope of a feature (this might be the case for example when a module system is supported). In general it is thus possible that a feature is in effect in some parts of the program and not in others. This allows conflicting SRFIs to be present in a given program as long as their scope do not intersect.
SRFI 0 does not prescribe a particular mechanism for controlling the presence of a feature as it is our opinion that this should be the role of a module system. We expect that future module system SRFIs will need to extend the semantics of SRFI 0 for their purposes, for example by defining feature scoping rules or by generalizing the feature testing construct.
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