Programmer-defined data types, version 2

["Morris J. Katz" <katz@polya.stanford.edu>]

   Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 18:15:50 edt
   From: cph@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Chris Hanson)

      Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 13:26:10 -0700
      From: Morris J. Katz <katz@Polya.Stanford.EDU>

	 Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 14:42:33 edt
	 From: cph@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Chris Hanson)

	    Date: Wed, 30 Aug 89 12:02:13 -0700
	    From: "Morris J. Katz" <katz@polya.stanford.edu>

	    For aesthetic reasons I would prefer to see
		(MAKE-RECORD-TYPE type-name . field-names)
	    rather than
		(MAKE-RECORD-TYPE type-name field-names)
	    as the for for MAKE-RECORD-TYPE.

	    How do others feel?

	 I prefer having a single argument which is a list.  Not only does this
	 reduce the number of characters that must be typed, but it simplifies
	 abstraction on the `field-names' argument, and leaves the argument
	 list open for adding arguments in the future.

      I might be swayed that it is important to leave the rest argument
      position open for future extensions; but, I hardly buy that the
      trade-off between 3 characters to form the list and one character per
      symbol to make it into a symbol represents enough of a difference in
      keystrokes to be important.  (My approach is actually shorter for
      records of 1 or 2 fields (-:)

   Since I was obviously making an aesthetic argument, let's just
   summarize by saying I prefer the aesthetics of a single list argument.
   (I notice that you said nothing about my "abstraction" argument.)

Maybe I am just being dense, but I am not sure to what you are
refering in your abstraction argument.  It is for that reason that I
did not respond to it. 

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Morry Katz
katz@polya.stanford.edu
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