[plt-scheme] upcoming change in PLT Scheme v300

I always suspected that BASIC was the point of maximal entropy/minimal
orderliness in the space of programming languages; this brilliant
demonstration that it constitutes an attractor for the dynamics of language
modification confirms it.

 -- Bill Wood

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jerzy Karczmarczuk" <karczma at info.unicaen.fr>
To: <plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 2:30 AM
Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] upcoming change in PLT Scheme v300


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>
> I appreciate very much the proposed changes to PLT Scheme.
> But why are you so incredibly conservatist? One should go
> further.
>
> Let me point out some pedagogical implications of the
> status quo.
>
> The most detestable form for my students is DEFINE.
> All or almost all other programming languages, including
> functional ones live very well without DEFINE. (Actually
> almost none have this bizarre construction LET whose
> meaning is usually completely abstract for the fresh
> undergraduates. And this is still extremely easy as compared
> with LETREC; I would eliminate both of them.)
>
> And for the French students there is another urgent affair.
> If you know French, you may be aware that in an elegant
> society the word CONS n'a aucune raison d'exister. So the
> list processing functions should be redesigned as well, at
> least lexically.
>
> On the other hand, all those who teach Scheme have from time
> to time show a full-fledged, relatively complete program, which
> does a lot...
>
> How many times had I to say (more or less):
>
> "And now, go to the line 174, and see for yourself where this
>  variable is used and how".
>
> Thus, I propose that you
>
> * introduce meaningful line numbering. I badly miss that!
> * the GOTO construction.
>
> Thank you for your contribution to the progress of
> Hanumanity.
>
>
> Jerzy Karczmarczuk
>
> Caen, Normandy, France.
> (Caen is the place where the campaign of William the Conqueror
> began. Because of him, the current version of Scheme is not
> written in a Saxo-Danish dialect, but in a language where such
> words as 'campaign' are heavily used.)
>
>