why not "multiple-value-bind"??

[John David Stone <stone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 > "Receive" seems kinda non-intuitive to me (like some sort of
 > networking thingy). Why not call it "multiple-value-bind" as in
 > Common Lisp?

        My reasons for using the identifier RECEIVE are: (1) Olin used it
in the reference implementation for SRFI-1, and (2) since I'm using this
construction frequently in a textbook I'm writing and am trying to keep all
the code between margins only 65 characters apart, I wanted a short name.

        These aren't conclusive arguments, and I'll try to keep an open
mind about other suggestions.

        Apart from its length, I've never liked the Common Lisp identifier
MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND because it doesn't conform to English syntax.  ``Bind
multiple values'' I could understand -- that's a standard English verb
phrase, or possibly an imperative sentence.  ``Multiple value bind'' --
what is that, grammatically?

 > Or if there's an adamant refusal to be the same as CL, what about
 > "with-values", perhaps?

        All the other WITH- constructions in standard Scheme are procedures
rather than macros, so using WITH- in the name of a macro feels a little
like overloading to me.  (On the other hand, the people who are writing
syntactic extensions using WITH-SYNTAX don't seem to mind.)  I'm also
worried about the confusability of CALL-WITH-VALUES and WITH-VALUES.

-- 
======  John David Stone - Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy  =====
==============  Manager of the Mathematics Local-Area Network  ==============
==============  Grinnell College - Grinnell, Iowa 50112 - USA  ==============
========  stone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/  =======