Hacker News: pmcgoron

New comment by pmcgoron in "Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain"

pmcgoron — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:11:10 +0000

> FL HOTDOG.MIAMI.FL.US. arodriguez@houseit.com

I'm very confused by this entry. There isn't even a miami subdomain, just a Dade subdomain.

New comment by pmcgoron in "LFortran compiles fpm"

pmcgoron — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:42:32 +0000

If you want to peer into an alternative reality / funhouse mirror of programming terms, you should look at ALGOL 68. For instance, types are called "modes".

https://jemarch.net/a68-jargon/

(There are also "incestuous unions", which is the actual term used in the spec.)

New comment by pmcgoron in "femtolisp: A lightweight, robust, scheme-like Lisp implementation"

pmcgoron — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:40:29 +0000

Would SectorLISP (https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/) count? It can run the LISP 1.5 metacircular evaluator.

New comment by pmcgoron in "Emulating Goto in Scheme with Continuations"

pmcgoron — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:27:21 +0000

From John Cowan:

TAGBODY doesn't actually require continuations, delimited or undelimited, just proper tail calling. A macro can rewrite each section of the TAGBODY into a procedure nested within a `let` that tail-calls its successor, and the body of the `let` tail-calls the first procedure. (GO tag) is then equivalent to just (tag). This is a great way of doing state machines. Chicken has a tagbody egg, I think.

New comment by pmcgoron in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

pmcgoron — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:30:15 +0000

I guess I'll have to read more about effect handling systems, I'm very much out of my element there.

> yes, macros are hygienic!

I'm glad. Too many lisps chicken out and don't add them.

> easier to type!

Fair enough.

This seems very interesting, I will check it out.

New comment by pmcgoron in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

pmcgoron — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:21:44 +0000

As someone who writes a lot of Scheme, I agree that the math syntax is not good. There have been proposals to add infix expressions (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-105/) but nobody seems to want them, or can agree on specifics.

However, code that is mostly function calls is fine for me, since those would have parentheses anyways in C++/Rust/whatever. In that case it makes the language more regular, which is nice for writing macros.

I'd be curious to hear your opinion on wisp (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html) and the Readable project (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html) which are significant indentation syntaxes for Lisp languages that are still closely related to the AST and allow for easy macro writing.

New comment by pmcgoron in "Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects"

pmcgoron — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:24:39 +0000

1. I don't know much about HM systems mathematically, but how do the effect handlers interact with type inference? I thought there was some issues with automatic inference there.

2. The macros examples on the website don't show binding situations. Are the macro hygienic like in Scheme?

3. Why the choice of [] over ()?