I like $. I think the shortness is important, because it is used a lot - arc simply doesn't have the functionality to do a lot of the scheme stuff we need. And it looks like and S, so it's mnemonic.
Plus I think in the long run, it will phase out of use. We'll settle on a good core set of features for Scheme to provide, provide those in-Scheme, and leave it at that. Maybe then we can rename it. But for now, while we're still exploring that area, it's important to make it easy.
My more serious objection is the inclusion of $ in the "stable" branch. Whatever makes it easy for you to do experiments in the wiki is fine with me. However the stable branch is advertised as being arcn + bug fixes, and I don't think taking over a punctuation symbol in support of fixing a couple of bugs such as "date" and "mkdir" qualifies.
Yeah, I wasn't really sure about this. It seemed to be the path of least resistance, but if you want to write make-directory, which-os, and so forth (or their more primitive components) in Scheme and get rid of $, go for it.
There is still seval, right? You could use seval rather than $ in the stable branch, since it won't have to be updated except for arcn releases and bug fixes, so maintenance won't be too much of a problem. And it doesn't require writing entirely new library functions to implement.
