Re: Graham released Arc

["Andrew Gwozdziewycz" <apgwoz@gmail.com>]

On Jan 31, 2008 12:55 PM, Ed Watkeys <edw@poseur.com> wrote:
>
> > * Really? It's not just an eval hack?
>
> What is the difference between "really" and "just an eval hack"?

I guess it was just an English kludge.

> > Slicing doesn't appear to work. i.e. you can't say ("andrew" 1 3) and
> > expect to get back "ndr", or even "nd" if the second argument isn't a
> > count...
>
> I tried the same thing. There doesn't seem to be a reason not to do
> that, aside from 1) available time and 2) it's of marginal value
> compared to the rationale for the unary function. Specifically, the
> big win with collections-as-functions seems to be in contexts like
> this:

There is subseq, which can do slicing on arbitrary collections...

> (= cipher "nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm")
>
> (def letter-index (ch)
>      (- (coerce ch 'int) 97))
>
> (def rot-13 (s)
>      (map cipher:letter-index s))
>
> (rot-13 "foo") ==> "sbb"
> (rot-13 "sbb") ==> "foo"
> (rot-13:rot-13 "foo") ==> "foo"
>
> Starting to wrap my head around the potential here. Anyway, the point
> is, collections-as-mere-unary-functions have a lot of potential.

Yeah, that is pretty neat.

> Regarding non-MzScheme hosted Arcs, it seems like a lot of pointless
> work at this stage. A lot of Lisps have lived hosted in other Lisps
> for extended periods. Arc is still subject to a lot of change. I don't
> see the value of a self-hosting Arc or even an Arc that's hosted
> elsewhere until it gels some more.

I realize that Arc isn't necessarily a good candidate for being
self-hosted, but also realize that there are enough people out there
with plenty of time to do it, and they undoubtedly will. I'm sure it
will include the controversial support for unicode.

-- 
Andrew Gwozdziewycz
apgwoz@gmail.com
http://www.apgwoz.com  | http://www.photub.com