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small changes
Can we flush internal DEFINE and get Abelson & Sussman w/Sussman to make
a new edition without it?
I would object as strongly as I possibly could to this (and other
people at MIT would also). It is not essential as it is, and does not
imply first class environments or side-effected lambda environments
anyway. The only thing it implies (if anything), is a more
complicated LAMBDA special form to "scan out" the defines and "turn
them into" LETREC.
I would also like to bring up the case insensitivity issue once again.
Yes, I do prefer that A-Symbol and a-symbol be different. I like to use
case to set off certain things, like X for set and x for the element in
(member x X). I see no value in having case-insensitive symbols, and
a lot of conversion trouble. I think most of us now have terminals with
lower-case letters. I would like the special-form keywords and function
names to be in lower case.
I find C impossibly hard to read precisely because people use
identifiers which differ only in case for different things. This is
even worse than the dual environment of Common Lisp (value cell vs.
function cell).
Natural languages do not usually have different meanings for words
with different capitalizations.
(if (If iF) (IF iF) (If If)) ;yipee!