Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
This doesn't feel right to me. By that argument, people would want to "improve"
(mapcar (lambda (x) (car x)) list-of-lists)
to
(mapcar list-of-lists (x) (car x))
I didn't claim that people would feel compelled to eliminate all uses of lambda; only that, in those cases where they *do* feel so compelled, they might not if lambda weren't such a long word. I was just trying to understand why Smalltalkers seem to get on fine without macros, whereas Lispers feel they are needed. I think Smalltalk's lightweight block-passing syntax has a lot to do with it. -- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+