From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Lisp & SICP Date: 2000/05/17 Message-ID: <3167576002217603@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 624636944 References: <391E9C25.94F5C377@uniserve.com> <3167393469185860@naggum.no> <39202cd5$0$207@nntp1.ba.best.com> <39207010.3C2A4CE8@kenan.com> <3920b0da$0$220@nntp1.ba.best.com> <3167453250589287@naggum.no> <3922d1a3$0$257@newsreader.alink.net> mail-copies-to: never Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 958587653 5166 195.0.192.66 (17 May 2000 18:20:53 GMT) Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 8800 8879; fax: +47 8800 8601; http://www.naggum.no User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.6 Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 17 May 2000 18:20:53 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * "Harley Davis" | Unless you are writing very deeply nested functions and use a lot of | shadowed variable names, or unless you are passing around a lot of | functions as arguments, the functional position in Scheme | expressions is quite stable. I disagree. Reading Scheme code, I have to check for these things all the time -- especially if I have to do so in order to assess the programmer as "wise enough" to avoid the problem, _and_ he's aware of the vocabulary of "standard names" that I subscribe to. (Lacking a package system and a language useless without extensions, this is not the same, simple issue it is in Common Lisp.) Common Lisp has a simple rule that you can't modify the meaning of symbols in the Common Lisp package globally. This lets me sleep well and read code with confidence. With Scheme, I have no idea what anything means unless I have checked. That makes me nervous, and because it's so utterly pointless to push this and many other problems on me as a (potential) user, I have come to dislike Scheme. | My experience is that in practice this is not much of an issue, | because most programmers are wise enough not to rebind standard | names, but I have a bias for the multiple namespace system because I | agree that it is marginally clearer for the human to see an explicit | function call when using functional arguments or computed functions. Sometimes, the margins are all that keeps us from ... Never mind. :) #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.