Re: What does "lacks a prefix" mean?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> let* says "I need variables which depend on each
>> other" and if they're really not, that look strange.

If let behaved like let* it wouldn't look strange to you.  Many other
functional languages dropped the "simultaneous let" and only kept the
equivalent of let* (or even letrec).

>> And probably it's a bit slower.

Regarding efficiency, there's no clear winner between the two.
It's basically irrelevant.

>> And non-parallelizable theoretically :)

In practice neither is easily parallelizable anyway.  And the work
needed to auto-convert a "let*" to a "let" when possible is trivial in
comparison to what's needed to parallelize the code.
So again, it's really irrelevant.


        Stefan