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arg order for PUSH
- To: Riesbeck at YALE
- Subject: arg order for PUSH
- From: Jonathan Rees <Rees at YALE>
- Date: Wed ,19 May 82 17:07:00 EDT
- Cc: T-Discussion at YALE
Arguments for (PUSH place item):
- Consistency with other location modifiers: they all take the
place-whose-value-is-being-hacked as their first argument.
- Ellis, Pitman, Adams, and Rees like it, and as everyone knows, they're
always right, esp. in concert.
Arguments against (PUSH place item):
- It's not status quo. Everyone (including Maclisp, Lispm, Common
Lisp, UCI Lisp, ...) does it the other way.
- It doesn't agree with the "natural" English rendering:
"push item onto list".
I give considerable weight to consistency arguments and not much to
status quo. Naturalness is subjective and my conception will be
different from other people's; anyhow, this is a programming language,
not English with prepositions deleted.
So we probably won't change it from its current definition: (PUSH place
item). Unless there's a coup.