Re: Iteration in lisp

On Apr 26, 8:34 pm, Kent M Pitman <pit...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I also think the inability to do

(setq x 1)

in a textbook is a travesty because it forces people to get into the
discussion of DEFVAR way too early. You want to be able to talk about
and test program fragments, and the inability to do that "portably" is
silly. I consider it unreasonable that an implementation ever
complain about this.

Hear, hear!

I don't understand how some implementors have convinced themselves
that emitting warnings in this case is acceptable. Yes, I know that
the standard doesn't really say what should happen and this is
technically an error. But it doesn't make sense to elevate the
standard above the precedent that has been set by existing
implementations when that precedent is important to users.

The standard is supposed to serve the user community. Some seem to
think it should be the other way around. I think this is the
fundamental problem.

It really astounded me the unsympathetic response I got the last time
I raised this issue here. Nice to know you're on my side, at least :)

-- Scott
.

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