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From: jinx@ALTDORF.AI.MIT.EDU ("Guillermo J. Rozas")
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: What is a Scheme?
Message-ID: <9008281047.aa07667@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 28 Aug 90 14:47:36 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: jinx@zurich.ai.mit.edu
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    1. I responded to your claim that numbers which as far as I am
    concerned includes number? can be written in your "Scheme core". I am
    happy to see that you know that this is impossible. 

Thank you for your blessing! :-)

It depends on what you mean by impossible.  It is straight forward to
implement number?, procedure?, etc., as long as you are willing to
follow some simple constraints.  In particular, the constraints are so
trivial that they can be built into the syntactic transducer that will
handle IF, LET, etc. for you, so I'm not sure that I agree that it is
impossible as opposed to merely awkward.

    2. The original question was "what is a Scheme". I answered to this
    question and interpreted it as "what is the essence of Scheme". I
    agree that one could interpret the question as "what is the part of
    Scheme that is most interesting to you".

Isn't that a possible interpretation of the word "essence"?