[plt-scheme] archival docs on arity

Wrong recall mechanism. For all I know,  I am thinking of Prolog.

On Sep 9, 2009, at 6:40 PM, David Van Horn wrote:

> Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>> On Sep 9, 2009, at 3:33 PM, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
>>> I argued for the inclusion of ARITY on the grounds that some other
>>> Scheme (Chez?) had it -- and I needed it for the first debugging
>>> support code I wrote.
>> We could ask Dan or Mitch, but I have the vague memory that even  
>> Scheme 84 allowed some arity inspection, and that this may have  
>> been derived from the implementation language (Franz).
>
> I would imagine that arity inspection was available in LISPs before  
> 1995, but I grep'd the Scheme 84 and Franz Lisp (Opus 38.92 for VAX)  
> source code and wasn't able to find any relevant occurrence of  
> "arity".
>
> I am generally interested in the history of arity inspection, but  
> more specifically in the history in the presence of case-lambda.  So  
> far as I can determine, the arity interface for PLT is the first  
> that handles case-lambda.
>
> If Chez had it, it went away.  Now, you have object inspectors from  
> which you can recover source code, from which you can calculate  
> arities, but the current Chez doesn't include anything like the PLT  
> interface out of the box.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>