Re: Why not support (begin), (cond), (case-lambda), etc?

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 9:50 PM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 9:26 PM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>>> Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>> This analogy is meaningless, but for the record
>>>> you should be using fold or reduce here.
>>>
>>> I don't think it is the task of a language to enforce arbitrary
>>> aesthetic criteria.  He "should be using"?
>>
>> This has nothing to do with style, but performance
>> and scalability.  "apply" will blow up in most implementations
>> depending on the length of the list.
>
> Do you think that we should remove the passage
>
>     `concatenate' is the same as `(apply append LIST-OF-LISTS)'.  It
>     exists because some Scheme implementations have a limit on the
>     number of arguments a function takes, which the `apply' might
>     exceed.  In Guile there is no such limit.
>
> from the manual in order not to seduce people into using Guile?

I think it should be removed because it's no longer true:

scheme@(guile-user)> (apply + (iota 1000000))
standard input:1:0: In procedure #<procedure 102329220 at standard
input:2:0 ()>:
standard input:1:0: Throw to key `vm-error' with args `(vm-run "VM:
Stack overflow" ())'.

-- 
Alex