Self function

[Francis Carr]

Scheme is arguably the programming language with the most support for
recursion, including the most complete support for tail-call
optimization, constructs like "letrec" to define collections of
multiply-recursive functions (which get used very frequently -- by no
means is it an uncommon situation, as you suggest in your initial
post), and hardly any iterative loops.  Yet -- scheme does not provide
out-of-the-box support for your proposed "let-a-function-implicitly-
refer-to-itself" idea.  This suggests that the idea itself runs
counter to more important aspects of a programming language.

In the special case of a self-recursive function, you would like re-
naming "to just work".  Out of morbid curiosity, I am compelled to
ask... why do you expect that re-naming anything --- a function, a
class, a module, a variable, anything --- in just one place but not
all the others should ever, under any circumstances, "just work" ?