Paul's questions

[John (_You_ hide, they seek.) Mackin <john@civil.su.oz.au>]

    > First impressions:  ``let'' and ``local'' are backwards!

    hmm, what do people think about this?

I agree.  They are backwards, or at least `let' should be the one that
introduces lexical bindings; I am not convinced that `local' is the
greatest name in the world for the one to introduce dynamic bindings,
and personally would vote for `flet' instead.

I suspect that every Scheme programmer will agree that they are backwards
(and I doubt that Ken Brooks was a Scheme programmer).  (Aside: Fascinating
ideas in that report of his, though!  I was surprised when I saw it as one
of your references... more synchronicity :).

    what's general opinion on adding a read primitive?

Of course es needs one.  No problems here.

    we had debated this extensively, and decided strings with nul
    characters in them weren't important.  were we wrong?

GNU find notwithstanding (snicker), you were absolutely right.

OK,
John.