[plt-scheme] why local? (just curious)

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:30 AM, Sigrid Keydana <keydana at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> sorry for writing such an unimportant question (please ignore it if it's
> too unimportant ), but I'm just curious about something:
> I remember having seen the "local" form in HDTP, but I'd thought it was
> for learning purposes only. Now I see it's used in the Continue Guide
> I'm working through and it's part of standard (PLT) scheme. I just
> wonder why it's necessary (or even "nice-to-have") - why not simply use
> let or letrec?

Hi Sigrid,

Ah!  The primary reason we used local for those examples was to avoid
the use of lambda for the the internal function definitions.  We
wanted to make the tutorial easy for newcomers to read.