user survey

[Eric Benson <benson%SPA-NIMBUS@MIT-MC.ARPA> (*** Unauthenticated sender ***)]

I'm not really a T user, but I'm always happy to put in my two cents
worth.

1.  Is it really important to be able to locally change the meaning of
the symbol QUOTE?  This strikes me as needlessly painful.  If you're
going to do 3-Lisp, do 3-Lisp, but don't inch your way there.  If you
can suggest a nontrivial application where it would be significantly
easier to do something if one could locally change QUOTE I could be
convinced this is important, otherwise it just seems to designed to give
the maximum shock value to users of other Lisp dialects.

2.  This is probably less likely to make code break, but again it
doesn't seem really worthwhile, unless you're going to introduce a
boolean falsehood object distinguished from the empty list as well.  As
I said, I don't think you can just creep up on 3-Lisp.

3.  (d) It should always be an error to use anything other than a symbol
as the object to be bound in a LET.  This is for a very practical
reason:  Three open parentheses in a row is too many, especially for the
destructuring case, when there could be yet more open parens at the
beginning of the destructuring pattern.  For the same reason I don't
like T's DESTRUCTURE syntax.  I prefer to have something which only has
a single destructuring pattern, so that there are NO parens surrounding
the pattern.  An example of this is

(DESTRUCTURING-BIND pattern from-value . body)

on the Lisp Machine.  How often do you really need parallel binding of
multiple destructuring patterns?

Common Lisp does NOT allow destructuring in LET, by the way.