SRFI 8 will become final in a week, so if you folks have any more
suggestions or objections to advance, this would be a good time to make
them. Here's how I perceive the state of the arguments that have been
raised so far:
(1) Possibly one could find a better identifier than RECEIVE, which
may incorrectly connote sockets or networking. But the proposed
alternatives aren't better -- MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND is cumbersome and
forced, LET-VALUES is already in widespread use for a slighly different
syntax, WITH-VALUES sugggests a procedure and might be confused with
CALL-WITH-VALUES.
(2) I still regard it as a non-trivial advantage that RECEIVE is
shorter than, say, MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND. Matthias correctly observes that
``when code margins don't work out, we have to rewrite code'' -- but I
reached the conclusion that RECEIVE is useful enough to justify a SRFI by
repeatedly rewriting a lot of multiple-values code until I found a readable
and concise syntax for it. So I think of RECEIVE as part of the solution,
not part of the problem.
(3) RECEIVE duplicates the functionality of MzScheme's LET-VALUES,
which has a slightly different syntax, but this duplication is not
particularly harmful and accommodates a community in which RECEIVE is
already an established usage.
So I'm proposing to let SRFI 8 become final in its original form.
--
====== John David Stone - Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy =====
============== Manager of the Mathematics Local-Area Network ==============
============== Grinnell College - Grinnell, Iowa 50112 - USA ==============
======== xxxxxx@cs.grinnell.edu - http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/ =======