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From: gjr@hplgr2.hpl.hp.com (Guillermo (Bill) J. Rozas)
Subject: Re: history of decision against documentation
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In-Reply-To: "Stefan Monnier"'s message of 10 Apr 1996 13:05:23 GMT
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 18:03:32 GMT
Reply-To: gjr@hpl.hp.com
References: <3037767071070684@arcana.naggum.no> <9604092031.AA27501@quilty.Stanford.EDU>
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In article <4kgbmj$nnm@info.epfl.ch> "Stefan Monnier" <stefan.monnier@lia.di.epfl.ch> writes:

|   In article <9604092031.AA27501@quilty.Stanford.EDU>,
|   Morry Katz <katz@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
|   ] The Scheme authors have consciously decided over the years not to address
|   ] development environment issues.
|
|   Wait. What is the point of the "dynamic" toplevel, then ?
|   I thought Matthias was exactly debating the fact that such support for
|   redefinitions was a "development environment" issue rather than a language
|   issue.

It depends on what you mean by "redefinition".

If you mean shadowing an existing binding by means of a new define, it
is primarily linguistic, not environmental.

If you mean definition as an alias for assignment, it is primarily
environmental, not linguistic.

Most Scheme dialects do not distinguish between these two.  Some do.

The reports (and IEEE version) were careful not to implicitly choose
between these two types of implementations, hence they allowed this
feature that may appear purely environmental from the perspective of
certain implementations.



