Re: Hierarchical lists, again

[friedman@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Noah Friedman)]

I think Harald's idea is great!  It confirmed my suspicions that
es already mostly has everything you need. 

I am skeptical that this should be added to initial.es, especially right
away.  It is easy for people to define for themselves if they really want
or need such a feature.  Personally, I want to play around with the idea
myself and see if I find preferable ways of implementing hiearchical lists.

It must be obvious by now that I think es should be stripped of many
builtin features, rather than adding more.  The only two things I really
want added to es are some sort of simple arithmetic capability (beyond
Church numerals :-)) mainly for doing faster manipulation of arrays (it's a
shame that deleting the last element of an array requires looping over the
entire array); and preservation of closures across invocations of es, which
ought to be possible by tagging closures with some ID.  The latter I don't
even think is a feature request---it's simply a bug in the current
implementation that it doesn't do so already.