> I don't have any sense of what you or Brian > might mean to indicate in saying "Scheme is Pascal".
Well, it was a /long/ time ago. :-) I wouldn't say anything quite so flamboyant today. But I think what I meant was something like this: I don't subscribe to the Lisp-as-ball-of-mud view. I think Lisp is jewel-like, too, and what that means is that it takes one central good idea and runs with it. Smalltalk is another one. And then there are those other languages, the bag-of-tricks ones that just assess what computers know how to do and serve those up. Pascal is one of those -- but it has a special place of dishonor even among those, because it thinks it knows what's good for you, better than you know. At a tender age I was exposed to MIT AI people talking scornfully about "protecting the user from himself." Back then I felt very strongly, and even now I feel somewhat, that the central new concern of R5, hygienic macros, was a case of someone thinking they know what's good for me. I know everyone disagrees with me about that, but isn't it how we Lispians all feel about requiring variable type declarations? Macro hygiene -- just listen to the sound of the name, for heaven's sake! -- was and is supported by arguments not so very different from the arguments for type declarations. (I'm not counting the arguments about efficiency, as in CL's optional type declarations.) And I confess to feeling smug whenever I see people much smarter than I sounding bewildered about how to accomplish something or other in the hygienic macro system that would be trivial to do -- working on the first try! -- with a FEXPR. So I think that's what I meant about Pascal. Nothing else in Scheme has that feel to me, except for when the PLT people explain to me why it's wrong of me to want to be able to load a file without them erasing my workspace. :-( P.S. Yes, I do understand that hygienic macros can be viewed as a virtually inevitable extension of Scheme's jewel-like lexical scope. That's the only benefit of being old; I can now see more than one point of view about things. (Some things. Not torture, for example.) But you asked... _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
