Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Pika 0.1pre3 -- writer, vectors, contributions

[Jonathan Walther]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 12:04:08AM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
> A new release from the Pika Scheme project is available at the
> usual mirrors:

Sounds cool; will there be support for POSIX system calls?  Will this
depend on a bunch of other libraries, or will I be able to stick this as
a completely self-contained program in the X source tree?

Also, I respect your effort to make Pika completely R5RS compliant, but
I dislike hygeinic macros.  After reading Paul Graham, I can see how
non-hygeinic macros are useful for some things.  I *also* read a paper
showing how R5RS "hygeinic" macros really aren't; you can go through
some ugly contortions to break the hygeine.

Since macro side effects can be useful, why make a person go through
contortions to obtain them?  I can see maybe adding some syntactic sugar
to make such side effects intentional, but why try to eliminate them
altogether?  I mean, we put safety guards on our Skil saws, but we don't
cover over the blade completely; what good is a saw that you can't cut
anything with?

http://paulgraham.com/

Cheers!

Jonathan

--

   It's not true unless it makes you laugh,                           
            but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.      

   -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

                    Geek House Productions, Ltd.

 Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
 QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
 General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-951-4142
Email:   address@hidden
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 13685 Hilton Road, Surrey, BC

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature