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From: Tim Pierce <twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: R4RS noncompliance on loading files
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Sender: Tim Pierce <twpierce@mail.bsd.uchicago.edu>
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Date: Fri, 1 Sep 1995 21:18:17 GMT
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In article <423vhv$4al@mozo.cc.purdue.edu>,
Bill Richter <richter@banach.math.purdue.edu> wrote:

>From the "System Interface" node of the R4RS manual:
>
>     The `load' procedure reads expressions and
>     definitions from the file and evaluates them sequentially.
>
>I think the only reasonable reading of this is that load will evaluate
>the expressions in the current environment.

That is certainly the most logical interpretation I can assign to
it.

>Am I lost here?  If someone tells you "Please read the following text"
>and you walk out of the building and recite the text in the parking
>lot, would you feel you had complied with the instruction?

That is a very strange question.  Would you feel that I had *not*
complied with the instruction?  Often when my manager or a co-worker
gives me an article and says, "Please read this," I go back to my
office to read it.  Are you saying that this is not within the
spirit of the question?  What bearing, exactly, do you feel this
has on the semantics of `load'?

>So I say that Scm, Gambit and MIT Scheme are R4RS noncompliant on load,
>or else the R4RS Manual needs to be revised.

Possibly.  It appears that MIT Scheme was co-authored in large
part by Chris Hanson and Bill Rozas; an eagle eye such as yourself
will surely note Hanson and Rozas among the editors of R4RS.  It
may be that the report is ambiguous on this point, but if this is
the case, I think you would find it difficult to characterize
convincingly the MIT Scheme authors as ignorant of the Report.  In
any event, your strident, self-righteous tone seems entirely out
of place.

>With MIT Scheme it's at least possible to do what my reading of the R4RS
>manual says ought to happen, replace the load command with 
>
>  (load "joker" (the-environment))

So it is.  And yet earlier you insisted that you did not know of
any Scheme system that exhibits this behavior.

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