Re: [GSOC][PATCH] userdiff: add support for Scheme

[Atharva Raykar <raykar.ath@gmail.com>]

On 29-Mar-2021, at 15:38, Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/03/2021 13:40, Atharva Raykar wrote:
>> On 28-Mar-2021, at 08:46, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The "define-?.*" can be simplified to just "define.*", but looking at
>>> the tests is that the intent? From the tests it looks like "define[- ]"
>>> is what the author wants, unless this is meant to also match
>>> "(definements".
>> Yes, you captured my intent correctly. Will fix it.
>>> Has this been tested on some real-world scheme code? E.g. I have guile
>>> installed locally, and it has really large top-level eval-when
>>> blocks. These rules would jump over those to whatever the function above
>>> them is.
>> I do not have a large scheme codebase on my own, I usually use Racket,
>> which is a much larger language with many more forms. Other Schemes like
>> Guile also extend the language a lot, like in your example, eval-when is
>> an extension provided by Guile (and Chicken and Chez), but not a part of
>> the R6RS document when I searched its index.
>> So the 'define' forms are the only one that I know would reliably be present
>> across all schemes. But one can also make a case where some of these non-standard
>> forms may be common enough that they are worth adding in. In that case which
>> forms to include? Should we consider everything in the SRFI's[1]? Should the
>> various module definitions of Racket be included? It's a little tricky to know
>> where to stop.
> 
> If there are some common forms such as eval-when then it would be good to include them, otherwise we end up needing a different rule for each scheme implementation as they all seem to tweak something. Gerbil uses 'def...' e.g def, defsyntax, defstruct, defrules rather than define, define-syntax, define-record etc. I'm not user if we want to accommodate that or not.

Yes, this is the part that is hard for me to figure out. I am going by
two heuristics: what Scheme communities in other places would generally
prefer, and what patterns I see happen more often in scheme code.

The former is tricky to do. I posted to a few mailing lists about this,
but they don't seem active enough to garner any responses.

The latter is a little easier to measure quickly. I did a GitHub search,
where I filtered results to only consider Scheme files (language:scheme).

Some armchair stats, just for a broad understanding:

  Total number of scheme files: 529,339
  No. of times a construct is used in those files:
    define and its variants : 431,090 (81.4%)
    def and its variants    :  18,466 ( 3.5%)
    eval-when               :   3,375 ( 0.6%)

There was no way for me to quickly know which of these uses are at the top
level, but either way of the more structural forms that do show up in Scheme
code, define and its variants seem like a clear winner. I am not sure if
it's worth adding more rules to check for def and its variants, given that
they are not nearly as common.