Re: I must be going mad!

Stephen> That actually is quite reminiscent of the style you Stephen> favor, it seems to me, but Python enforces it and Stephen> provides some syntactic sugar. ms> The nice thing about Scheme is that you can define your own ms> syntactic sugar. Stephen> Of course, the common Lisp opinion is that's the problem with Scheme. Stephen> /duck I don't think so: Common Lispers define their own syntactic sugar all the time. Except it's, for the more interesting cases, a much more painful and error-prone process because of the capture problems. Stephen> Seriously, one of the things I do like about Python is that I know Stephen> that [ x, y, z ] is a (mutable) list, ( x, y, z ) is an (immutable) Stephen> tuple, and { a : x, b : y, c : z } is a dictionary (== hash), no Stephen> matter who wrote the program. As for lists, the distinction is equally clear in Scheme, if not equally visible (well, depending on your screen font): `(x y z) is mutable '(x y z) is immutable Not that this is a fact often intrinsically used in Scheme programs. Stephen> And the same notations construct both Stephen> "literals" and compound objects, as if you didn't need the backquote Stephen> notation in `(a ,x). I admit that this makes me nervous :-), but I Stephen> haven't been screwed by it yet, all-hail-the-BDFL. I can see that. But sooner or later, you run into situations where the built-in sugar just ... isn't sweet enough. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla