Re: Proposed modifications to R3RS

[Morris Katz <MKATZ@A.ISI.EDU>]

>> b)  Overspecification should be avoided as it artificially
>>     prohibits reasonable implementations.

>> 3)  I believe that AND is overspecified as it states that "[...]
>>     If all the expressions evaluate to true values, the value of
>>     the last expression is returned."

>>     (A similar change should be made to OR.)

>Your complaint about AND is that it returns the value of the last form
>instead of simply true or false.  But calling that "overspecification"
>is just another way of saying it should return simply true or false,
>they overspecified.

If by true and false above the author meant #t and #f, this is not what I
advocated at all.  I carefully specified that AND and OR should return a true
value or a false value (by which I meant something that acted as a true or a
false when used by IF and COND.).  I strongly believe that specifying that 
AND and OR return either #t or #f would be overspecification in the oposite
direction.  My original specification makes all current implementations
adhere to the standard.  It just allows new implementations to perform
more effective optimizations of the uses of AND and OR.

					Morry Katz
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