> What makes you think that mathematicians would vote against > multiple return values?
Oh, because actual functions only have one value; that's what makes them functions rather than relations. That's why I said "mathematician" and not "theoretician," which some of the responses to my message seem to have thought I meant. Seems to me that all the great programming languages are built on mathematical ideas rather than computer science ideas. We have Lisp (functions), APL (vectors), Prolog (relations), and ISETL (sets). > One big group is users that care about records, a module system, and > Unicode in addition to R5RS. They are not language designers they are > users. > Another big group cares about research (theory, implementation, and so > on?); language design, these are the experts. > Should there be one language for both? As others have said, this seems like a funny way to divide us. I view myself as a Scheme user, not a theoretician and certainly not an implementor, but couldn't care less about records or modules, still less Unicode. I care about teaching students the power of the idea that programming languages should be designed, not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. (That's from memory, so probably not quite right. :-) I enjoy explaining why we don't need to invent Scheme++. If there's a division, it's probably between industrial users and academic users. Maybe implementors are a third camp; I'm not sure. Should there be one language for both? No; there should be Common Lisp for the industrial users and Scheme for the academic users. Anyway, I'm glad to have precipitated some actual discussion -- it's been awfully quite on the list since the electors were invited to join it! :-) _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
