This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 86 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 86 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Sebastian Egner scripsit: > Now the rationale for <unspecified order> in procedure > application is... > > ...not really obvious to me, either. My guess: > > a) Theory people like it big time because the order of > evaluation of argument expressions is a non-essential > feature of the model, and would have to be introduced > into the semantics artificially afterwards. > > b) Implementations are free to choose the internal > representation of argument lists, and hence also the > algorithms for evaluating these expressions. The C language allows the same freedom to implementors, and probably for the same reasons: on some machines it's faster to evaluate LTR, on others RTL is better, depending on the natural growth direction of the stack. C has a mild advantage over Scheme in this area, in that Scheme systems are compelled to treat a variable number of arguments as a Scheme list, whereas C uses magic syntax to provide access to such arguments. (This is the only place in which a Scheme datatype is actually exposed other than through the standard library.) -- John Cowan www.ap.org www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@xxxxxxxx Lope de Vega: "It wonders me I can speak at all. Some caitiff rogue did rudely yerk me on the knob, wherefrom my wits still wander." An Englishman: "Ay, a filchman to the nab betimes 'll leave a man crank for a spell." --Harry Turtledove, Ruled Britannia