On 3/21/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> "UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because
> that policy would also keep them from doing clever things." (Doug Gwyn)
This is probably the source of my rant about stupidity/cleverness.
> We could be inspired by Lisp, and make false == [], rest([])=[] /
> false, etc. (a pun which I take advantage of all the time in Lisp
> programming). We could be inspired by C, and make [] / false equal 0,
> and have ar[234234] (where ar is a declared array) inspect some memory
> location. We could be inspired by Perl, and have 23+"45" = 68,
> true+false=0, etc.
>
> They all allow you to do "clever things", but I don't want them in Maxima.
Neither do I, because those are not consequences of everything
is an expression & partial evaluation is OK.
The cleverness I want to reward is the cleverness of extrapolating
from existing Maxima principles, not the invention of new ones.
FWIW
Robert