Re: Vectors as functions

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

So why not have first-class names?

I'm thinking of situations where you might have a list of symbols
representing names (or first-class names) and you might want to set their
values to a given value, like mapping set! over the list of names.  Not
having names as first-class entities makes that unduly hard.

Mike

> From: Michael Sperber <sperber@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>
> Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 18:21:52 +0200
> 
> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Vanier <mvanier@cs.caltech.edu> writes:
> 
> Michael>    [Aside: I still don't understand why scheme has set! as a primitive
> Michael>     special form instead of as a function whose first argument is a symbol.
> Michael>     Ideally you'd have both, of course, but the latter seems more primitive
> Michael>     to me.  IIRC the very first version of scheme had "set" as a function.]
> 
> I guess the explanation for Lisp hackers would be:  in Scheme, symbols
> aren't names.
> 
> -- 
> Cheers =8-} Mike
> Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla
>