Michael Sperber wrote: > You point out my lack of insight into the performance implications of > the design decision we made.
Lack of insight would have been tolerable. Pretended insight, which is the only possible source of the two paragraphs of tendentious nonsense that were added in the 5.97 draft, is intolerable. > I will point > out that the aspect of the syntactic records layer you're criticizing > has been on the table publically since late 2005, Untrue. The two paragraphs of tendentious nonsense were new in the 5.97 draft. My essay placed those two paragraphs in the context of language design because those two paragraphs appear to have been intended to excuse poor language design and/or to scare programmers away from superior designs that would have been offered via the SRFI process. > and no alternative > designs (on top of the same procedural layer) were available before the > candidate draft. After the editors had announced their intention not to consider these issues further, proposing a superior design to this set of editors would have been pointless. As you well know, I had resigned myself to using the SRFI process. If and when an R6RS is ratified, I will propose a better syntactic layer as a SRFI. If the editors had changed their minds and expressed their willingness to consider improvements, then it would have made sense for us to have discussed these things in advance of a candidate draft. Until the current draft is rejected, however, I see no point to having such a discussion. > I'm also on the record for saying: > > - No matter what the syntactic layer, somebody will be sufficiently > unhappy with it to write up their own. You have also known for some time that I would be among those people. That was a stable compromise that all parties could have accepted. The editors terminated that compromise by adding the two paragraphs of tendentious nonsense. It now appears that the primary technical basis for those two paragraphs consists of two load instructions that fetch the free variables of a closure. Furthermore one of those load instructions is easily eliminated for almost all record accesses even with the procedural layer, and the other is just as hard to remove with the syntactic as with the procedural. I can accept poor language design. I cannot accept false and misleading attempts to excuse poor language design or to discourage programmers from using closures. If the editors wish to advocate nonsense, they should do so in their individual publications, not in the R6RS. Will _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
