change to the Guide: syntax-id-rules is confusing

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Stephen Chang

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Jul 29, 2016, 11:50:12 AM7/29/16
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Would anyone object if I removed mention of syntax-id-rules from the
Guide (and added a "deprecated" warning in the reference)?

I think the documentation should not give the impression that
syntax-id-rules is idiomatic Racket since it will confuse beginners.

syntax-id-rules is poorly designed because (syntax-id-rules [id ....])
seems like it should create a rename-transformer-like identifier macro
that matches only identifiers but instead it matches "any". The Guide
example itself suffers from this buggy behavior.

I realize that there has already been a lot of discussion about
changing or replacing the macros section of the Guide but the part
about syntax-id-rules is particularly misleading for users and needs
to be updated sooner rather than later.

At least one large project, Rosette, had some bugs that I suspect are
due to the Guide's influence.

Alex Knauth

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Jul 29, 2016, 3:49:26 PM7/29/16
to Stephen Chang, dev
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