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From: "John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com>
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Subject: Re: what's wrong with some existing IF languages
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 08:11:46 -0400
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Chris Kirkwood-Watts <kirkwood@totzeit.net> wrote:
> __ John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com> _____
>| As I understand it, if you know the number of parameters each function
>| takes, and which names are functions (which I remember at least a few LISP
>| implementations make you annotate, if not all of them), then they're all
>| effectively redundant (due to the simplicity of the prefix notation),
>| except in the case where you return a function.
>  Ah, now I understand why you might think this.  The statements you have
>  written above are logically true; however, many Lisp functions (and most
>  arithmetic ones) are of variable arity.  For example, the function + will
>  consume as many arguments as you give it:
>    (+ a b c d e - + / foo bar ^ mod expt z ? and f)

While I did leave enough leeway for this ("if you know the
number..."), I did forget that this extended into arithmetic,
since it's been quite a few years since I've played with
LISP.  Thanks for the refresher.

[...]
