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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