> In my experience, people like to have a kind of a concrete hold on > syntax.
I confess that the macro system is one of the two parts of Scheme (the other is call/cc) that give me a headache whenever I think about them. Usually I think I can understand macros/continuations themselves, but they both seem to have deep implications for the meaning of everything else (e.g. the bug about call/cc vs. letrec in the early RnRS). I worry about trying to get people who aren't programming languge experts to love a language with these esoterica. But I'm reasonably happy as long as I can have a simple understanding of Scheme provided that I promise not to write macros or capture continuations. (Sort of like being able to use the substitution model as long as you promise not to use mutation!) But when you say that I can't think of symbols as identifiers /even when I don't write macros/ I worry that there is no way to learn this language if you're not already expert in it! Maybe this will play out like the history of object-oriented programming: In the early days hardly anyone outside PARC could understand what the Smalltalk people were talking about, and then 10 years later the same people who didn't understand were saying that every programming style other than OOP is obsolete. Maybe in 10 years everyone will take hygiene for granted (except for really old people like me, who'll be retired by then and able to ignore the issue :-). But meanwhile, I need a "continuations and hygienic macros for dummies" book -- if such a thing is possible. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
