[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[not about] A Modest Tail-Recursion Proposal



    Date: Thu, 9 Mar 89 10:15 EST
    From: Scott McKay <SWM@SAPSUCKER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

	Date: Wed, 8 Mar 89 19:21 PST
	From: Gumby@MCC.COM (David Vinayak Wallace)

	    Date: Wed, 8 Mar 89 17:39 PST
	    From: York@Chuck-Jones.ILA-West.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (William M. York)

	    LOOP was adopted into the new ANSI Common Lisp standard at the last
	    X3J13 meeting.

	Wow, talk about bad news.

    Yeah, as much as I use 1loop0, I've never really thought it was suitable
    for adoption into a clean and shiny standard.  How did it manage to get
    passed?

The way any addition/modification to a standard gets passed.  People
recognized a need for an abstract facility (in this case a more powerful
iteration construct) and someone (in this case Lucid) came forward with
a solid proposal with N pages of documentation for something that has
been in use for a while, so the members vote it in.  There are some
other groups developing other iteration packages, but they haven't
received wide exposure and testing yet.

I was a little horrified myself, but I have also been writing portable
Common Lisp code lately and one of the worst parts is having to use DO
all the time (actually, DO*, since LOOP has destroyed my ability to
write the parallel-assignment clauses :-).  A collecting-into facility
plus just the interation-path part of LOOP (i.e. no WHEN) would be good,
but there was no collection facility at hand.

LOOP.  Can't live with it.  Can't live without it.