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From: roman@sparc17.hri.com (Roman Budzianowski)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Virtues of Lisp syntax
Message-ID: <1990Sep24.173652.20458@hri.com>
Date: 24 Sep 90 17:36:52 GMT
References: <E++5MBC@xds13.ferranti.com> <33709@cup.portal.com> <1990Sep10.091911.20877@hellgate.utah.edu> <PCG.90Sep13135243@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk> <1990Sep18.002137.10940@cbnewsc.att.com>
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Reply-To: roman@sparc17.hri.com (Roman Budzianowski)
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In article <E++5MBC@xds13.ferranti.com>, peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter
da Silva) writes:
> In article <PCG.90Sep13135243@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk>, pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk
(Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
> > The real challenge here is that we want some syntax that says, apply
> > this operator symbol to these arguments and return these value_s_. Even
> > lisp syntax does not really allow us to easily produce multiple values.
> 
> I may be being more than usually dense, here, but what's wrong with returning
> a list? What could be more natural?
> -- 
> Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
> +1 713 274 5180.   'U`
> peter@ferranti.com

My understanding was that the major reason is efficiency: multiple
values are returned on the stack, instead of consing a new list. The
rest is a syntactic sugar ( important in that if you are interested only
in the first value there is no additional syntax).