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. Of course, the common Lisp opinion is that's the problem with Scheme. /duck Seriously, one of the things I do like about Python is that I know that [ x, y, z ] is a (mutable) list, ( x, y, z ) is an (immutable) tuple, and { a : x, b : y, c : z } is a dictionary (== hash), no matter who wrote the program. And the same notations construct both "literals" and compound objects, as if you didn't need the backquote notation in `(a ,x). I admit that this makes me nervous :-), but I haven't been screwed by it yet, all-hail-the-BDFL. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py