Kenny  <kentilton@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Kenny wrote:
| http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/tall-ship-and-star-to-steer-her-by.html 
| > ...some wise soul pointed out:
| > "First principles are Good Things. In Lisp, every form returns a value. 
| > That first principle works great. This despite Tilton's Law of 
| > Programming: All X all the time is the root of all evil."
...
| > Still working on how I can talk myself out of that one.
| 
| I got it! Every form returning a value is necessary for us to have the 
| functional paradigm /available/ to us, and it is a fine paradigm, we 
| just do not want to be enslaved to never changing state.
+---------------

And it is precisely this lack of "enslavement" which motivated
CL to *silently ignore* excess return values and provide NIL
for excess caller requests for them, whereas the Scheme standards
[and most Scheme implementations] blow chunks at any caller/callee
mismatch on number of values.

Liberty vs. safety. No brainer! I pick liberty!


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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