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Re: SRFI-96 and SRFI-98

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 98 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 98 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Aubrey Jaffer <agj@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Exactly my point; environ is useful for debugging.  For that purpose
> it doesn't need to be precisely specified or mandated.  For debugging,
> it would be just as useful if (environ) printed out the environment
> table rather than returning a Scheme structure [and more convenient to
> type than (for-each (lambda (pr) (write pr) (newline)) (getenv))].
> Consider the "room" function of Common-Lisp:
> http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/hyperspec/HyperSpec/Body/fun_room.html

It's always easier to go from a function that returns a
structured representation to one that just prints stuff than vice
versa.  And I can imagine using a structured representation of
the entire environment, for instance if I wanted to create a
subprocess with a particular set of environment variables.  What
is more, unlike the room function, there is a perfectly good
implementation-independent possible spec for what this function
should do, so there's really no reason not to specify it.

$0.02,
~Alexey