From: Joe English
Subject: Re: please tell me the design faults of CL & Scheme
Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2001 18:28:03 +0000
Message-ID: <97u1fj0v3b@news2.newsguy.com>

Julian Morrison wrote:
>
>Please tell me the parts of (1)Common Lisp (2) Scheme that are "broken as
>designed".

This should be pretty easy to figure out: just come up
with (A) a list of Common Lisp features that aren't in Scheme,
and (B) a list of Scheme features that aren't in Common Lisp.
Schemers will cite (A) as stuff that's Broken as Designed
in Lisp, and Lispers will cite (B) as stuff that's Broken
as Designed in Scheme :-)

But seriously, IMHO 'dynamic-wind' and 'call-with-values'
in R5RS Scheme are broken.  The ideas behind them are good,
but R5RS should have left 'call-with-current-continuation'
alone and added 'call-with-winding-continuation' instead
to support dynamic-wind.  For multiple values, Ashley &
Dybvig's 'mv-call' and 'mv-let' primitives would have been
a much better choice than 'call-with-values'.


--Joe English

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