Re: Where do you want to go tomorrow?

Stephen> But (from this third party's point of view) neither of Stephen> you has really explained what the advantages are to your Stephen> preferred dialect. ms> My case for Scheme has been at ms> http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/sperber/xemacs/next-gener... ms> for a while. Been there. The only thing I understood in that page was that Scheme is small, elegant, extensible and thus a good candidate for a substrate. Agreed. The rest was so much noise, except for the "now you've got two big problems" comment about CL, which I would tend to agree with but as you point out yourself, and Hrvoje agrees, XE-CL would be a scaled-down version. Ah, and I do agree with your assessment that CL's goal of compatibility with various historically important Lisps is inappropriate for XEmacs's substrate. I don't really see the need for so many different ways of expressing a conditional, for example, and they always leave me with the sneaking suspicion that (cond ((this that))) (if this that) and (when this that) have different semantics, but I'm not sure what it is.... This is a great way to create a write-only language, IMHO. ms> Many features aren't part of the Scheme standard because they ms> can be easily expressed within the language as it stands. True ms> concepts are more important, and here CL is weak. I could go ms> on about the virtues of hygienic macros, the evils of CL-style ms> macros, especially in connection with module systems, the ms> usefulness and beauty of call-with-current-continuation ms> etc. etc. etc. Someone make me. OK. *twist, twist, twist* However, URLs where I can find out WTF the vocabulary means ahead of time would be vewy hehpfuh.[1] I've been to Indiana's Scheme Repository; I don't know where to start. Re: global options and keyword arguments ms> However, Scheme idiomatics usually uses a parameterization ms> mechanism to achieve what you're talking about; they're ms> similar to a structured and thread-compatible version of ms> dynamic binding. Urk. I mean, URL please. :-) I'm not sure I agree with you, if I do get the general direction of your thought. I'm talking about situations where we are currently stuck choosing between ;; isn't it a shame that the FSF is now doing ;; (defun foo (arg &optional face) ...)? (defun foo (arg &optional coding-sys) ...) (foo "insert me in" 'euc-jp) and (defun foo (arg) ...) ;; boy this is ugly compared to ;; (foo "insert me in" :coding-sys 'euc-jp) (let ((coding-system-for-insertion 'euc-jp)) (foo "insert me in")) What does that look like in Scheme idiom, if your idea does apply? ms> (Note that the reverse is not generally possible, since Common ms> Lisp is not properly tail-recursive and does not support ms> control abstraction.) Stephen> Do we care? Ie, can you give specific examples where Stephen> those features would be useful to developers, either of Stephen> the core XEmacs or of application libraries, or enhance Stephen> efficiency of a running XEmacs? ms> You're quoting me out of context: I was talking about running ms> Scheme code inside a Common Lisp substrate. But _we_ only care if those features would be useful to XEmacs running Scheme idioms emulated inside a Common Lisp substrate. No? ms> The term [proper tail recursion] doesn't exist as a noun. As ms> I said above, a Scheme implementation is properly ms> tail-recursive if it implements tail calls as gotos. No, you didn't say it. At least, not in words _I_ could understand. Point is that a lot of the people who should contribute to this discussion don't even know where to start asking questions. I assume I'm not the only person totally ignorant of modern programming language theory on this list. Is that assumption unjustified? Footnotes: [1] See? I have been doing my homework. At least I know that "We're hunting RABBIT." Or a modern version thereof. [ObRef Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd.] -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +1 (298) 53-5091