Finality approaching

[John David Stone <stone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        SRFI 8 will become final in a week, so if you folks have any more
suggestions or objections to advance, this would be a good time to make
them.  Here's how I perceive the state of the arguments that have been
raised so far:

        (1) Possibly one could find a better identifier than RECEIVE, which 
may incorrectly connote sockets or networking.  But the proposed
alternatives aren't better -- MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND is cumbersome and
forced, LET-VALUES is already in widespread use for a slighly different
syntax, WITH-VALUES sugggests a procedure and might be confused with
CALL-WITH-VALUES.

        (2) I still regard it as a non-trivial advantage that RECEIVE is
shorter than, say, MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND.  Matthias correctly observes that
``when code margins don't work out, we have to rewrite code'' -- but I
reached the conclusion that RECEIVE is useful enough to justify a SRFI by
repeatedly rewriting a lot of multiple-values code until I found a readable
and concise syntax for it.  So I think of RECEIVE as part of the solution,
not part of the problem.

        (3) RECEIVE duplicates the functionality of MzScheme's LET-VALUES,
which has a slightly different syntax, but this duplication is not
particularly harmful and accommodates a community in which RECEIVE is
already an established usage.

        So I'm proposing to let SRFI 8 become final in its original form.

-- 
======  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/  =======