Re: The GIMP! By gum, I forgot all about it!

[Keith Wright <kwright@tiac.net>]

> From: Lauri Alanko <lealanko@cc.helsinki.fi>
>
> On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Keith Wright wrote:
> > A macro to make Guile's set! return the assigned value is occasionally
> > useful and mostly harmless, but it is not really worthwhile to try
> > to emulate SIOD behaviour on undefined variables.
> 
> Um, are you aware of the context of this discussion?

Well, I thought so.  You may think otherwise.  I reviewed the
whole thread before posting this.

> No one claimed that SIOD's behavior is better, or illegal.
                                         ^^^^^^ worse?

I thought the message to which I replied did exactly that, to wit:

> From: Scott Goehring <scott@poverty.bloomington.in.us>
> The real issue is that siod's set will create new global bindings...
> Guile (consistent with the Scheme standard) will not...
> SIOD's LISPish heritage is showing...

So I pointed out that SIOD is legal, although I agree it's worse.

> It is simply incompatible with guile, which is a problem that
> needed to be solved.

Exactly right.  
 
> Somehow I doubt you'd want to go through a hundred script-fu scripts
> and add those defines there everywhere..

It depends upon the alternative.  I would do that in preference to
changing the Guile core.  Upon review I find that nobody was advocating
that.  Furthermore you (Lauri Alanko) and Maciej very early
posted macros which look like they could work.  If so, use them
and be happy and virtuous---much of this thread has been pointless.
Several people posted broken macros, and I thought a macro would
not work (and I still think so if macros are restricted to R5RS).

I still hope that after a transition period the scripts will be
changed and the macros can be swept up by the cosmic garbage collector,
but there's no hurry if the macros work.

-- 
     --Keith

This mail message sent by GNU emacs and Linux.
Food, Shelter, Source code.