From: Cowmoo
Subject: SERIES
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:44:51 +0000
Message-ID: <1184528691.158140.175180@o61g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>

Does anyone know why SERIES was not put in the standard rather than
LOOP?

• Re: SERIES Barry Margolin
  • Re: SERIES Kent M Pitman

From: Barry Margolin
Subject: Re: SERIES
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:04:46 +0000
Message-ID: <barmar-7D745B.21044615072007@comcast.dca.giganews.com>

In article <························@o61g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>,
 Cowmoo <······@gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know why SERIES was not put in the standard rather than
> LOOP?

It wasn't in common use, and was still in active development.  LOOP was 
relatively stable and had been popular for several years.

-- 
Barry Margolin, ······@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***

From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: SERIES
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 03:18:01 +0000
Message-ID: <ufy3p82ae.fsf@nhplace.com>

Barry Margolin <······@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> In article <························@o61g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>,
>  Cowmoo <······@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone know why SERIES was not put in the standard rather than
> > LOOP?
> 
> It wasn't in common use, and was still in active development.  LOOP was 
> relatively stable and had been popular for several years.

And there are aspects of its implementation that, to do correctly,
would have needed the environment-inquiry functions that had not been
finalized either.  (They're mentioned in CLTL2 but had to be backed
out for the standard because we couldn't get that work to converge in
time.)  The trickiness of writing a portable code-walker without
access to such operators is an impediment to a tool as complex as
SERIES.  (I vaguely recall, too, that SERIES needed COMPILER-LET and
it was tricky to rewrite it without COMPILER-LET.)