Re: bindings and assignments (was: Re: continuations)

[Scott McKay <address@hidden>]

At 1:43 PM -0400 8/21/03, Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs wrote:
>
>
>But, as my previous message explains, your assumption
>was incorrect.  We (or, more specifically, John Rose,
>who had previously worked on C* and other languages
>using Symbolics Lisp Machines) were far from lazy: he
>did the whole shebang. and user feedback made us back off.
>

With all respect, you should have looked beyond the
user feedback.  It is my experience that most users
don't actually know what they need; they only know
what they wanted yesterday and might possibly want
today and maybe tomorrow.  (And I literally mean
"yesterday", "today", and "tomorrow".)  This is no
surprise since knowing what they want in a language
is not their immediate concern, since they have other
work to do that is more directly relevant to their
jobs.  It surely could not have been the case that
including the "whole shebang" would have made the
current restricted case more difficult from a user's
point of view, if properly presented.