Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!gatech!udel!burdvax!sdcrdcf!ucla-cs!pierce From: pierce@CS.UCLA.EDU Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme Subject: Re : set in Scheme Message-ID: <12063@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> Date: 6 May 88 19:27:02 GMT Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU Reply-To: pierce@CS.UCLA.EDU () Distribution: na Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department Lines: 21 In reply to David Chin about "set in Scheme". I'd have to agree with Pavel that it's better to recode without passing around different symbols. However, there's a lot of code out there, UCILISP for natural language processing for example, which uses "set" all over the place. If you just want to get some simple examples from a text or article running, you may not consider it worth your time to recode everything; fortunately the problems described by Pavel may not be that critical either for this type of code. If so, why not just forget about elegance for a little while and save yourself some trouble. Just hack out a horrible little ugly macro like the following: (macro set (lambda (e) `(eval ,`(set! ,(eval (cadr e)) ,(caddr e))))) But I don't think I'd be "sticking my neck out" by saying that THIS doesn't adhere to the "Scheme philosophy", so I would use it only in emergencies. -- Brad Pierce