Re: constant `e'

[Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

>> Of course it's an idiom.  That doesn't mean it looks good.
>
> Lisp is not designed to look good.

That doesn't mean it looks bad.  S-expressions won.
They weren't meant to be beautiful, but they are.

Apparently you are saying Lisp is so ugly that there is no
point in attempting to make it look nicer.  Is that right?

Then explain why we have aliases such as `not'.

>> I, as a speaker of Emacs Lisp, would prefer not to use
>> this idiom if `otherwise' became an accepted alternative.
>
> It didn't.  Try getting it into Common Lisp first.

It's already there, and I already mentioned it (`case').

Scheme has `else'.  Dylan has `otherwise'.  Those are both
modern lisps in which this has become an accepted alternative.

I'm not going to try to get `otherwise' into CL's `cond',
simply because I don't use CL and I don't care about it.
(Even if I did, I wouldn't hope to be able to change it.)

-- 
Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se>