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Date:Mon Dec 14 18:14:45 1992 
Subject:Re: Syntax Misdesign 
From:John Williams 
Volume-ID:921215.02 

sfk@otter.hpl.hp.com (Steve Knight) writes:
> The number of beginners who want to build a list of one element with the
> result of a computation, say ``f(x)'', in it who write
>     [ f(x) ]
> must be beyond recall.  In fact, I suspect _every_ programmer made this
> eminently sensible guess when they were learning to program in POP and
> discovered, to their horror, just how wrong they were.

Only those programmers who had the misfortune to learn another
language first!. I don't think there's anything intrinsically
counter-intuitive about the fact that the list and
vector syntax doesn't evaluate items by default.

John