Re: n-ary functions rfc

[david carlton <carlton@husc.harvard.edu>]

I forwarded a copy of the n-ary functions proposal to a friend of
mine, and his response was (essentially) "why not just use length and
list-ref"?  I tend to agree with him - rather than introduce new
syntax to support another method of handling optional arguments, why
not use the existing syntax and procedures to support that method?  I
don't think that it would be any more tedious to use length and
list-ref than to use the proposed method, and I would think that
compilers would be able to optimize either way equally well - the only
thing that I can see preventing them from optimizing the uses of
length and list-ref is the lack of some way to guarantee that they
haven't been redefined by the user, but in practice the Scheme
compilers that I'm familiar with will inline standard procedures and
at any rate once a module system is added (if one ever is...), that
problem would go away.

david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu

       I don't know WHY I said that..  I think it came from the
       FILLINGS in my rear molars..