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Re: perhaps I've missed something ...

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 17 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 17 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



>>>>> "Per" == Per Bothner <per@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Per> sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes:

>> Definitely.  I just taught this stuff to 250 beginning students last
>> week, and many had been confused by the obscurity in programming
>> languages they had learned before.

Per> An equally plausible explanation is that they were not taught
Per> (properly) the concepts of references (lvalues) and the concept of
Per> pass-by-value.

Well, yeah, exactly.  The point is that it is being made harder to
teach by that obscurity introduced by the overloading of SET! (or = or
whatever it's called in their favorite programming language).

Per> I find it inelegant to use two forms where one is a
Per> generalization of other other, and the latter is just as
Per> convenient.

But it makes explicit a conceptual difference people need to
understand anyway which is a good thing.  Overloading could collapse a
lot of procedures and special forms into one in just about any
language, but that doesn't make the idea inherently elegant.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla