Re: Dotted pair call argument

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>> I guess my "real" problem is that I'd like to do call wrapping by writing
>>
>> (lambda ( . x) (fun . x))
>>
>> instead of having to write
>>
>> (lambda ( . x) (apply fun x))
>>
>> I assume eval is not supposed to try dealing with dotted lists?
>
> The problem is that (f . (g x y)) is equivalent to (f g x y).
> Therefore, while Scheme could in theory support procedure calls with a
> dotted tail that happened to be an atom, it would do something rather
> different and confusing if the dotted tail was itself a procedure/macro
> call.

A list in dotted tail position is evaluated via (map ... eval) rather
than (eval ...).  I don't see much of a problem with that.

It works fine for () as one can see:
guile> (+ . ())
0
guile> 

So why not for others?

-- 
David Kastrup