Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 01:17:27 -0400
From: s398960@aix1.uottawa.ca (Patricia Wilson)
I guess that's a difference between a language like Pop-11 and Dylan.
Pop-11 evolved slowly through over 20 years of research. Dylan people
are in a big rush to define and freeze the language. Scott, you want to
to make the major modifications quickly; and rather than merely saying
I do?
that you are just postponing minor additionsoewhich would be quite
legitimate because of time constraintsoeyou reject legit ones as
clutter. Of course, there are proposals that are just clutter, but my
The onus is on you to demonstrate that a proposal is not clutter. You
haven't done that. In fact, by dint of its symmetry with 'if', I
think you have succeeded in proving that it is just clutter.
(admittedly low priority) proposal just combines logically related
constructs in a natural way that (I conjecture) 99% of programmers
will use in most of their programs. No new term is added, the syntax is
merely enriched. Rather than argue about the particular merits of this
minor proposal the interesting question that is up for grabs is:
How does one disguish between clutter and a good language design
proposal? The question applies both to very minor modifications, and
major ones too.
"Clutter" is stuff that gets added to the language which could have
been trivially expressed in the language via a very simple macro or a
very simple function. It's stuff that adds another way to do the same
thing. Pop-11 is admittedly a cool language -- I've used it, and
enjoyed using it -- but I don't think that presenting it as a paradigm
of good modern language design holds much water.
So I stand by my claim. Your proposal just adds stuff of the language
without enriching it. Your version of 'unless' is exactly 'if ~'; In
fact, I proposed flushing Dylan's existing version of 'unless' for the
same reason. Write a macro.
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