[r6rs-discuss] Hashes in the number syntax

[dyb at cs.indiana.edu]

Speaking not as an editor...

> I searched an additional ~140Mb of Scheme source. ...

I wouldn't expect to find many occurrences, if any, in Scheme source code. 
For that matter, I rarely see inexact constants of any kind in Scheme
source code.

Instead, I would expect it to appear primarily in the output of programs
that print floating point numbers (say using some implementation-specific
mechanism for specifying the number of digits) or possibly in input data
sets.

Regardless, I agree that the hash syntax is probably not often used, but I
think it's a useful notation and will be even more useful (and more used)
once we standardize on formatted output.  The cost to support it is small: 
the syntax occupies a syntactic space that is not likely to be useful for
anything else, and the added reader complexity is minimal.

> I believe that nobody uses this notation, and that it should be dropped 
> from R6.

The syntax is used, at least by Chez Scheme's formatted I/O, as I noted in
an earlier note.

Kent