Barry Margolin  <barmar@bbnplanet.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Erick Gallesio <eg@essi.fr> wrote:
| >student program which found natural to code something like:
| >    (define foo (lambda ( . args)  ....)
| 
| It also seems like this would be very natural mistake for programmers
| switching from Common Lisp to Scheme.  The CL lambda-list syntax is
| 
|     (<named args> &rest <rest-arg>)
| 
| The Scheme syntax usually just substitutes "." for "&rest".  The degenerate
| case in CL is (&rest <rest-arg>), so (. <rest-arg>) would seem to make sense.
+---------------

And amusingly enough, this is exactly the syntax I chose when defining
an "parenthesis-lite" infix dialect of Scheme for some non-programmers
to use locally in a certain application [but that's another story]:

	fn <arglist> in <cmd>           Anonymous function (Scheme's "lambda")
	   arglist forms:
		fn in <exp>             no arguments
		fn a b c in <exp>       exactly 3 args
		fn a b . c in <exp>     2 required args, "c" gets list of rest
		fn . a in <exp>         "a" gets list of args (may be empty)

So it's it's a bit odd that I would argue [previously in this forum]
*against* interpreting "( . a)" as "a".  O.k., o.k., I recant!


-Rob

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