Re: Why not support (begin), (cond), (case-lambda), etc?

[David Kastrup]

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri 06 Jan 2012 07:50, David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Do you think that we should remove the passage
>>
>>      `concatenate' is the same as `(apply append LIST-OF-LISTS)'.  It
>>      exists because some Scheme implementations have a limit on the
>>      number of arguments a function takes, which the `apply' might
>>      exceed.  In Guile there is no such limit.
>>
>> from the manual in order not to seduce people into using Guile?
>
> We should remove it, because it is currently incorrect.  (Apply splats
> the lists on the stack, and thus you might run out of stack.  Growing
> and shrinking the stack on over/underflow is something that needs
> doing.)
>
>> Why should be try to educate people into using a programming style that
>> delivers suboptimal results with Guile?
>>
>> Where is the point into keeping Guile in every regard at least as bad as
>> its worst competitor?
>
> Be nice, please.  Alex was just trying to help.

I was not actually trying to be non-nice here.  But the point Alex was
making is that we should not encourage any usage of Scheme that might
work only with Guile, and that we should not let Guile support any
practice that might fail elsewhere.

And I don't get the rationale for that.  Why should we strive hard to
make Guile worse than necessary, just to make it easier for people to
stop using it for their applications?

-- 
David Kastrup