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.
sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes: > > [ snipped discussion about education ] hi there, all of you. I am but a humble programmer, 5 years away from the academia, and here is my view on the subject of "set!" overloading. if you are only interested in academically rigorous discussion, don't bother reading further. 1. what I, in my naivete about PL design, take "set!" to be? (set! <name> <value>) translates, in my mind, to: dear Scheme, please make it so that next time I say <name>, and <name> denotes the same thing as now, I get <value>. from the above, the <name> -> <form> progression is quite natural. perhaps if "set!" were not called "set!", but instead were called "lexical-rebind!", the translation would be different. 2. do I like the fact that "set!" is called as it's called? yes, very much. 3. do I have trouble undertanding call-by-value? no. 4. what the present debate is about? taste, culture and pedagogical qualities. 5. can a language be elegant from a humble practitioner's point of view and at the same time good for teaching? not necessarily. for example, I would consider different set!'s for lexical bindings and data to be silly and distracting. once you have no trouble walking, a walking cane only obstructs you. 6. so what do we do about this SRFI? it appears that we have two camps, which are both informed, and which agree to disagree (well, I agree to disagree with Shriram and Mike, I don't know if they agree to disagree with me, but I hope so). this is SRFI, so informed disagreement should be fine, right? right? > Cheers =8-} Mike --mike -- There are few personal problems which can't be solved by the suitable application of high explosives.