Re: modifying array access syntax


Kent;

I just wanted to say thanks, both for this and many many
other little insights into the history and design of lisp
dialects.

I've crawled all over the docs for lots of these "lost
lisps", and observed things I like (such as callable arrays)
and wondered how/why they didn't come forward into modern
lisps.

I've also chased the idea of lisp-1 vs. lisp-2 back into
the mists of time and found that most dialects originally
had symbols with property lists where you could store any
number of keyed datums. "Function cells" and "Value cells"
are in fact remnants of the property lists of these Lisp-N
systems.

But the fact is reading the docs doesn't convey the issues
that people actually ran into using these systems, and your
little aside here about the semantic cheese created when
reordering the property lists made me realize a new aspect
about what these systems were like in practice.

(note:  I think I've decided that properties for symbols
are a win; symbols *should* be able to contain an arbitrary
set of named values.  But I think the interface for it
should leave it possible for it to be implemented as a
hash table instead of a list, and I'm still not sold on
the idea of different evaluation rules for first vs.
other positions in a call, at least not by default).

			Bear

.