CPH reply on DEFINE

[Chris Haynes <cth%indiana.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>]

> CPH%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA /  9:33 am  Mar 30, 1985 ****/
> 
> It seems that the ability to have many
> different environments in which to perform incremental definitions has
> been consistently overlooked by almost everyone except MIT Scheme and
> T.  Anyone who has ever tried to program a BIG system, and by that I
> mean something over 500-1000 pages of code, knows that this kind of
> packaging is **ESSENTIAL**!!  So please don't try to take this away.

We grant the importance of such a facility, and are not trying to take it
way; but there is no concensus on how to provide such a facility, so it
is too soon to standardize on one.  (Similarly, syntactic extensions
are **ESSENTIAL** to the kind of thing we do here; but it is also too soon
to standardize on a syntactic extension mechanism.)

We were simply debating whether SET! should be required to extend the
global environment if its identifier is unbound (or equivalently, have
everything bound in the global environment to begin with).  This would
make DEFINE unessential, though it might still be optional.  It has
nothing to do with multiple environments for incremental definition,
except that MIT uses DEFINE for both purposes.

Chris
Dan