Hey John: While I do not feel so bad about making it an error to assign an unbound identifier, I do have to mention that this general attitude of feeling safe to make anything an error because implementations can then do whatever they want with it unsettles me a bit. I think we are coming across quite strongly when we say that it should be an error, no matter what the implementation wants to do with that error. If we really are neutral on the view of what implementations should do and we do want to encourage an underspecification, then we should use other language, such as calling it an unspecified behavior or the like. We should reserve calling things errors when they may be considered legitimate. Assuming that you twist things around a little bit in your terminology, such as what Chez Scheme does with calling all variables implicitly bound already, then you can get away with saying that we really do not want to SET! unbound variables, and I think I could generally agree with this, but it seems to become much a word game at that point, and I wonder at that.
-- Aaron W. Hsu | [email protected] | http://www.sacrideo.us Programming is just another word for the lost art of thinking. _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
