From: Julian Morrison
Subject: Re: please tell me the design faults of CL & Scheme
Date: 
Message-ID: <983723217.29408.0.nnrp-13.9e98cc46@news.demon.co.uk>
"Kent M Pitman" <······@world.std.com> wrote:

>> Please tell me the parts of (1)Common Lisp (2) Scheme that are "broken
>> as designed". 
> 
> why?  in what context do you ask the question?  what use do you plan to
> make of the information?  what do you mean by broken?

Personal interest - specifically for some possible point in the future if
I reimplement a lisp-alike, I don't want to make any of the same mistakes.

Broken in this context means:

- inconsistencies in the spec such that conforming implementations can
fail to interoperate. especially subtle ones I might make again myself.

- misfeatures that make implementation unnecessarily hard, or
resource-wasteful, or unnecessarily force the runtime to be more complex

- security holes, things with unintended consequences

- design slips that make the language less generally useful than could
have been possible, or make certain uses impractical or impossible

- ugly special-cased hacks that break out of the cleanness of the design

- design anachronisms, language features unhelpfully tied to dated tech
limitations
 
etc etc. That sort of thing.

>"i'm designing my own language, what should i do differently".  

That's more or less the context, without any implied promise of imminent
action ;-)