On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Brian Harvey <[email protected]> wrote:
> Mathematicians have, I'm afraid, suffered from their initial decision that
> variables must have single-letter names. I think that's why they've had to
> recycle the same letter to mean different things in the same equation! In
> studying math texts (especially those Dover ones that have more formulas than
> explanatory words) I've gotten confused many times because the same letter
> meant different things in different fonts -- that's even worse than case
> sensitivity!
Mathematicians are famous for their love of concision. Being able
to choose a similar but different symbol for two related but not
identical things is useful for exposition, especially if the
convention is used uniformly.
What strikes me about this whole discussion is that these
low-level lexical considerations are an almost entirely uninteresting
part of the Scheme language. I don't see any compelling reason to
make the particular details part of the core language. Let the user
specify their lexical preferences on a per-programming-unit basis.
Not to mention that it seems unreasonable (and possibly
offensive) to try and anticipate all of the complexities of the
textual representations used by every potential Scheme user and compel
them to use the "correct" resolution.
Demote the lexical details to the "library" level.
Lynn
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