Proposal for EVAL

["Guillermo J. Rozas" <jinx@martigny.ai.mit.edu>]

   Date: Wed, 20 May 92 17:55:51 -0700
   From: freeman@MasPar.COM (Jay R. Freeman)

   >                                          that to be completely
   > consistent with the Macintosh philosophy, LOAD would have to accept no
   > arguments, and then it would pop up a dialog box for the user to
   > specify the file to load.

       So why is this a reason to do away with LOAD?  I did a Scheme for the
   Macintosh in which

	   (load <filename>)

   loads the file,

	   (load)

   pops up a dialog box to specify the file, and

	   Command-L

   (typed on the Macintosh keyboard) also pops up the dialog box.  Command-L
   only works when the interpreter is waiting for something to read in the
   top-level loop, but (load) would work from within a program, perhaps in
   connection with some other emitted message to remind the user of what
   is going on.

					  -- Jay Freeman
					     freeman@MasPar.COM

The argument was that the version of LOAD that took an argument was
inconsistent with the philosophy and therefore should (if any attempt
to support the philosophy was made) not exist.

I don't think Will Clinger particularly believed in this argument.  He
was mostly pointing out how the version of LOAD in the report
presuposed certain environment characteristics that might be
inappropriate or even meaningless in the near future.

I personally think that this is a mistake in the Macintosh, MS
Windows, and similar GUIs.  I have no problems with load taking
arguments.