2.28.2 Abstract and rationale

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.