Henry Lenzi wrote at 08/03/2014 11:52 PM:
What I'm sensing is that you seem to be concerned about bugs with
Racket Scheme's EVAL. Is that it?
I do not understand what the problem with EVAL is. Would you please
state clearly what the problems are?
Eval is one of the issues. Sorry I have to be very brief right now, but
a few problems with eval in general are:
* Prevents much static checking.
* Likely increased difficulty debugging.
* Often executes arbitrary code with privileges, which might be
corrupted due to accident or attack, which can be very bad.
* Prevents some optimization.
* Crutch that prevents learning better idioms.
Also, things like reading in a code file and looking for markers in it
is something we sometimes do (especially in, say, Emacs editing mode, in
which likely oopses are not so grave), but failure-prone.
Also, the code I saw was not idiomatic in, say, how it uses globals.
Anyway, it's good that Racket lets people experiment this way. The
concern I have in my mind is that newbies reading language forums often
get ideas about idiomatic programming from examples they see, and even
copy&adapt examples they see (maybe even evolving it into production
code, or blogging it where other newbies pick up on it...). People
should experiment as much as they liked, but I think it would be good to
if newbies knew when something they're looking at is an experiment
rather than (yet) considered best practice.
I appreciate your participation in the community, and your experimenting.
Neil V.
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