On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Ray Dillinger<[email protected]> wrote: > Scheme's specification > of hygienic macros as opposed to first-class environments came > after long and acrimonious discussion about the effects of > first-class environments on compilability and is, I believe, > a case of performance optimization being valued over expressiveness > and generality.
No. The reason I oppose first-class environments is not *directly* because of efficiency and performance. I want to be able to reason about my code statically (that is, without running it). When I write lexical scoped code, I want to statically know what binding any particular reference refers to. First-class environments allow you to dynamically change the binding structure by inserting bindings where none existed before. The reason the compiler cannot compile the code is because the code cannot be statically reasoned about. If the *compiler* can't reason about the code, a human has no hope. -- ~jrm _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
