Property maps over lists for functions



Am Dienstag, den 08.09.2009, 15:01 -0700 schrieb Richard Fateman:
> The main issue seems to me whether the function can take a list as 
> argument ... for example,
> 
> length([a,b,c,d])    should return 4.
> 
> not
> 
> [length(a),length(b),length(c),length(d)]
> 
> which might be [1,1,1,1]    or maybe an error.
> 
> 
> presumably we would not automatically map length to sublists ...

I do not see a problem, because only functions which are declared to
have the property 'maps-over-lists do this simplification. It is the
task of the developer to provide only useful functions.

Dieter Kaiser