[racket] Lazy take is the identity?

About a minute ago, Jukka Tuominen wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> a funny coincidence. I was just experimenting with ". args" a few
> days ago - the number and order of arguments, that is. I tried it on
> "filter" since I always seem to forget the order of arguments.
> 
> (define (my-filter . args);; ignores the order of arguments
>  (filter (car (filter procedure? args)) (car (filter list? args))))
> 
> (my-filter number? '( 1 a 2 b))   >> (1 2)
> (my-filter '( 1 a 2 b)  number?)  >> (1 2)
> 
> I'm not seriously suggesting to use this hack, just a funny
> coincidence...

I've tried something like this in the past, and overall my experience
is that it leads to a mess.  Some of the problems:

* People won't rely on both variations working, and will want to know
  what's the "blessed" way.  Related to this is the problem of
  documenting it.  (IMO this is a case where the difficulty in making
  a good documentation corresponds to a bad function design.)

* Much easier to get confusing errors.

* You need to check that you have the right number of arguments, for
  example -- your code will make this work:

    (my-filter 'bogus number? "bogus" '(1 2 3) 123)

* Also there's a question of how to deal with extending the function
  -- what if the extension needs two lists?

* Finally, all of this is worse in a lazy language -- where you can't
  even check the types of the inputs without forcing them, so for
  something like `take' you won't be able to make it so
  (take 0 (error)) will not throw an error.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!