why not "multiple-value-bind"??
John David Stone 02 Jul 1999 13:52 UTC
> "Receive" seems kinda non-intuitive to me (like some sort of
> networking thingy). Why not call it "multiple-value-bind" as in
> Common Lisp?
My reasons for using the identifier RECEIVE are: (1) Olin used it
in the reference implementation for SRFI-1, and (2) since I'm using this
construction frequently in a textbook I'm writing and am trying to keep all
the code between margins only 65 characters apart, I wanted a short name.
These aren't conclusive arguments, and I'll try to keep an open
mind about other suggestions.
Apart from its length, I've never liked the Common Lisp identifier
MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND because it doesn't conform to English syntax. ``Bind
multiple values'' I could understand -- that's a standard English verb
phrase, or possibly an imperative sentence. ``Multiple value bind'' --
what is that, grammatically?
> Or if there's an adamant refusal to be the same as CL, what about
> "with-values", perhaps?
All the other WITH- constructions in standard Scheme are procedures
rather than macros, so using WITH- in the name of a macro feels a little
like overloading to me. (On the other hand, the people who are writing
syntactic extensions using WITH-SYNTAX don't seem to mind.) I'm also
worried about the confusability of CALL-WITH-VALUES and WITH-VALUES.
--
====== 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/ =======