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Re: [Chicken-users] future of chicken?


From: Perry E. Metzger
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] future of chicken?
Date: 08 Aug 2002 16:10:18 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2

William Annis <address@hidden> writes:
>         I don't know if Pete has made this clear yet, but he and I
> have been having fantasies about things we want our Perfect Lisp to
> have.  Chicken was the lucky implementation in our search for the best
> Scheme to start with for the full corruption. :)

It has come pretty close to my choice in a very similar recent search,
too.

> My main motivation is ARC (http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html)
> which includes some radical changes: replacing the wordy 'lambda' with
> 'fn' (making anonymous functions smaller and forcing less
> indentation); making 'if' anaphoric.  That is, have tests bind the
> answer to 'it' in the bodies of the "then" and "else" clauses.  Other
> sorts of things are at the ARC page.

I've read the ARC page and I liked some of what I saw, but I'm not
sure I buy into the whole thing. The emphasis on concise expression
seemed generally reasonable, though I'm not sure it can't be taken too
far. Perl is often not very readable when people go too far with the
syntax, APL triply so. Calling lambda "fn" might not be stupid,
though, and it is nice at times to have perl-style anamorphic constructs.

Many of the ideas, of course, could be tested out in scheme just by
adding a few macros and playing.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger                address@hidden
--
"Ask not what your country can force other people to do for you..."



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