Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!linus!ramsdell From: ramsdell@linus.UUCP (John D. Ramsdell) Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme Subject: Internal definitions as a combination of LETREC's and LET*'s. Message-ID: <41415@linus.UUCP> Date: 31 Oct 88 13:55:21 GMT Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA Lines: 67 I would like to shift the current topic of this news group to an issue of Scheme language design: the meaning of internal definitions. I contrast two interpretations of internal definitions: [1] internal definitions as LETREC's, and [2] internal definitions as a combination of LETREC's and LET*'s. R3RS describes internal definitions in Section 5.2.2. Some Scheme implementations permit definitions to occur at the beginning of the syntactic entity , and are simply a syntactic variation of LETREC. In my opinion, they are an important variation as they reduce the number of paratheses and make programs more readable. Let me remind readers of the definition of LETREC of Section 7.3. It is equivalent to the following combinations of LET's and SET!'s: (LETREC (( ) ... ( )) ) ==> (LET (( ) ... ( )) (LET (( ) ... ( )) (SET! ) ... (SET! ) )) The second LET is there to ensure the property that the init expressions are evaluated in an arbitrary order. That is, no init expression can depend of the value of any other one. Thus the following is incorrect. (LAMBDA (X) (DEFINE A 4) (DEFINE B (* A A)) (+ A (* X B))) Yet at top level, it is okay to define values in terms of other definitions. An obvious way of making internal definitions behave more like top level definitions, is to specify the order in which the init bodies are evaluated. I call this interpretation internal definitions as a combination of LETREC's and LET*'s; a definition becomes equivalent to the following combinations of LET's and SET!'s: (LET () (DEFINE ) ... (DEFINE ) ) ==> (LET (( ) ... ( )) (SET! ) ; init's must be evaluated ... ; in the order presented. (SET! ) ) Aside from making internal definition behave more like top level definitions, I think this meaning of internal definitions reduces the number of parentheses, and makes programs more readable. What's your opinion? John