[no subject]

[Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at MIT-AI>]

I don't think your macro deals with the problem at all, actually; the
problem was what if you want to do (G x x), and you don't want to write
and compute "x" twice.  In your macro it looks like you just get to say
"*" once, and other "*"s refer to later quantities rather than letting
you get at the first one again.

It is pretty easy in Lisp to just say
 (let ((quan <form>))
    (g quan quan))

If you wanted something more concise, you would need some way of getting
quantities named without specifically putting in a form that names them.
LOGLAN (an artifical natural language, so to speak) has this hack where
there are five "variables" that automatically get assigned, in order, to
the first five things mentioned in a sentence; you can then refer to
these by using pronouns (I belive the words used to reference them are
LA, LE, LI, LO, and LU or something).  This works because people break
things up into sentences and they don't individually get too
complicated.  (Does this remind you of registers A, B, C, D, and E?)

I don't see any good way to put this into a programming language, but
maybe someone else does...