Small snag. I used drscheme 372 and anarki. opened as.scm as per instructions and ran it, but it error'd out on loading ffi.scm. I'll try and install drscheme 352 to see of that helps.
I can imagine as a language founder you'd hate remarks like the one above, where other people tell you that in order for your language to remain popular, you have to address these and these and these points.
What would excite me most (but I'm somewhere at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to language design) is that different new and old ideas for implementation of certain language features can be tried in arc.. so.. if we want to be able to load modules, what kind of options do we have to design a loading system.. and what about arc gives us new / better options to design a module system that other languages did not have, and thus could not consider as an option.
> How much more expensive is cons compared to multiple return values?
It depends on the GC used and on the implementation. mrvs are usually pushed on the stack, so there is no GC overhead. When I develop applications with Lisp, I notice that most of the time reducing the amount of garbage speeds up the program noticeably. It's not only a problem of consing, it's also a problem of collecting the garbage. More garabage, more collection cycles.
Wouldn't it be more useful it prn and pr not only have their side-effect of printing, but also return the sideeffect (i.e., return the string they just printed)
Heh. Lua is pretty nice. Wrote a few mods for warcraft in it. The prefix notation is growing on me though as it appears to be clearer to my mind what is happening when things are written in prefix than infix (took a bit of getting used to though).
