Subject: Re: Avoiding unintentional variable capture From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/11 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3146052864905406@naggum.no> * Iver Odin Kvello <iverk@hfstud.uio.no> | Gambit Scheme ... | | Also, in the R5RS under 6.3.3, Symbols: "Some implementations have | 'uninterned symbols' ...".[2] we're talking about the _language_ Scheme, here. you just can't base a _language_ feature on something that only exists in some implementations, and you certainly can't dismiss it as if the existence of implementations that go way beyond the standard is a feature of the language. quite the contrary in my view. so I'm being anal and discuss the language as per specification. | The program-as-text thing of the RnRS is pretty strange though; I've | never seen any real argument of why it's supposed to be a good idea[4]. well, it does make it much easier to construct tools for it in non-Lisp languages, using lex/yacc, and more "usual" compiler techniques. | DEFMACRO obviously isn't a safe-syntactic-abstraction-Right-Thing all by | itself, but it seems pretty Right-Thingish anyway, given what it can do. I agree with this, but I also think it is sometimes impossible to get it all at once, and when this is the case, it's more important to settle on _something_ and agree that the issue has been settled than to oscillate between things you never settle on. #:Erik -- it's election time in Norway. explains everything, doesn't it?