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why undefined return values?
- To: guile at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- Subject: why undefined return values?
- From: PILCH Hartmut <phm at a2e dot de>
- Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:17:00 +0100 (CET)
Having read r4rs and scsh-manual.ps and started to write scheme programs,
I am desperately looking for something like (setq a 1) that will return
the value. (set! a 1) is quite useless in most programming contexts that
I am used to think in, coming from (Common and Emacs) Lisp.
I can't see any design advantage in providing unspecified return values
and I expected to find a heated debate on this in some FAQ, but I didn't.
Scheme is said to be functional, but it looks rather procedureal, often
returning undefined or useless values, like C.
Should I go back to Lisp and not bother with Scheme any longer, or could
there possibly be some good reasoning behind this?
--
phm