ITERATE use (was Re: [cl-typesetting-devel] CLISP support)

[Marc Battyani]

"Klaus Weidner" <kw at w-m-p.com> wrote:
>
> The LOOP chapter of the Style Guide could be quite short - don't use
> iteration variables in the FINALLY section ;-)

He, he... ;-)

> The implementations seem to agree on everything other than that.

No, there is also the sequential vs global tests. Where CLisp differs from
the other ones.

> > Increasing the total size of source code without real necessity is also
not
> > good IMHO. Adding ITERATE would blow up the project, let alone
rewriting.
> > Personally, I hate learning new things when the old work almost fine:-)
>
> ITERATE has a couple of very nice features that LOOP doesn't have, for
> example better nested loops - you can COLLECT data into a variable of the
> surrounding loop from an inner loop. Also, it's easily extensible.
>
> And the rewriting would be fairly straightforward, since the semantics
> are essentially equivalent to LOOP. It's not nearly as big a change as
> SERIES would be.

Yes, ITERATE is a superset of LOOP.

> It's Marc's decision - I can live with either one. I'd suggest reducing
> the complexity of loops of either kind if at all possible, similar in
> spirit to the v-split change I made.

Still don't like LOOP heh...  ;-)
But I agree that loops should keep a reasonable size.

A good point in favor of ITERATE is that the semantics can be precisely
defined and implemented. I discussed with Andreas and he is open to modify
it and the associated doc so that it is really usable.

A bad point is that it is not standard. So this will make the sources less
readable for others.

Opinions on the subject are welcomed!

BTW Andreas has put a new version of ITERATE with a postscript manual. I
will try to look at it this evening.

Marc
[I've put Andreas Fuchs in copy]