At 5:43 PM -0500 1/20/00, Lars Thomas Hansen wrote:
>  >pps. let and letrec are both binding constructs. I don't see why we
>  >need two different forms.  Why not just use 'let,' and if any of the
>  >right-hand-sides happen to refer to the name they're bound to,
>  >implicitly change the whole thing into a letrec?  I think this would
>  >be much simpler and avoid lots of confusion.
>
>Personally I think this whole LET business is a wart (and probably
>inherited from BASIC, to boot -- good grief!)  We should all be
>programming in CPS.

touche.

john clements

...Which is to say, as I have before, that I have nothing against
syntactic abstraction per se; however, the introduction of language
forms does change the nature of the language, even when those
language forms may take the form of local syntactic transformations.
It's my opinion that this change (extended set!) secures a minimal
savings at the cost of conceptual clarity, and for that reason is
not, in sum, a win for the language.