Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk+10@cs.brown.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock) writes:
| >	    At the very minimum, the students should be taught that such
| > forms are extensions of the standard language and possibly non-portable.
| 
| Nothing of the sort.  The students should be given a library, a set of
| Scheme implementations it will work across, and a warning that the
| library may not work on other Scheme implementations, resulting in
| errors such as ....
| 
| The students should NOT be *taught* about portability at all.
+---------------

But your suggestion *is* "teaching about (non)portability", at least
your suggested warning is. And given that, from my point of view we're
actually in violent agreement here.

+---------------
| Otherwise, the classroom would rapidly come to resemble comp.lang.scheme.
+---------------

Bah! Unlikely. The classroom still has a "professor" & "students", and
the professor holds (or *should* be holding) the gavel to avoid ratholes.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 31-2-510		rpw3@sgi.com
SGI Network Engineering		http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
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