Re: Vectors as functions

[Bruce Lewis <address@hidden>]

Michael Vanier <mvanier@cs.caltech.edu> writes:

>    [Aside: I still don't understand why scheme has set! as a primitive
>     special form instead of as a function whose first argument is a symbol.
>     Ideally you'd have both, of course, but the latter seems more primitive
>     to me.  IIRC the very first version of scheme had "set" as a function.]

The latter is more primitive; that's the point.  Code can be compiled
that doesn't know or care what variable names were in the source code.
If you want a language that knows and cares what the variable names are,
you can extend Scheme with macros to do it.