Re: moderation

[Sanjai Narain <narain@rand-unix.ARPA>]

The question I asked is not as trivial as it sounds to people who
seem to have objected to it. It has to do with the necessity of quoting
expressions, something which is absent from other systems such as Prolog.

Hudak made the mysterious comment that Scheme/T doesn't need
to quote either. Well, if you want to set x to the symbol a try typing
(set x a). In Prolog you can do X=a quite legitimately. The problem
is simply that in Lisps there is no way of distinguishing variables from
constant symbols of the same name. So, you must use quote. The matter
is further complicated in the use of backquotes and by the dubious
distinction between evaluation and macroexpansion. What is the purpose of
this distinction? In the lambda calculus evaluation is simply repeated
macroexpansion to the normal form.

What distinguishes Scheme/T from other Lisps but language issues such
as lexical scoping and higher order functions? Yes, what indeed? If people
don't seem to be interested in discussing such issues here, as Jonathan
implies, I understood the purpose of  this list quite incorrectly. Sorry.

FYI hardly anyone objects like yba@athena.mit in other language-oriented
lists like Prolog, or Franz-friends.

-- Sanjai