Something in Brian Harvey's comments about mathematicians and multiple values caught my eye. I'm not going to argue one way or the other about the benefits of values, but I thought I'd make some comments. And I'm not about to argue that, as a mathematician, I should get two votes in approving or disapproving any future proposed Scheme standard ;-).
As Brian is surely aware, his definition of values and call-with-values as (define values list) (define (call-with-values thunk receiver) (apply receiver (thunk))) doesn't match the current definition of values since right now (values x) => x But I thought about the connection between values and mathematics when I came across a definition of "tuples" in mathematics in a textbook I'm using for a course this semester, which is found at http://www.trillia.com/zakon-analysisI.html On page 32 one finds an inductive definition of tuples that matches precisely the definition of values in Scheme. In my development of an array library that defines arrays simply as mappings on finite n-dimensional intervals whose coordinates are integers, this notion of tuples seems to be the most useful way to think about the indices of arrays. So perhaps "values" in Scheme does have a strong connection to mathematics. Brad _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
