Re: return

[MON KEY]

> just out of inertia but also because I like a more functional style
> of programming: usually/often you can find a formulation that's just
> as elegant without the need for an early exit.

I don't see how (of itself) this preference is sufficiently applicable.

W/re the current inertia of the Emacs lisp VM, it seems whatever
"elegance" gained by the "functional" style it provides is per the
dynamic scoping, and even so it still _requires_ dynamic non-local
exits with catch/throw.

How do you anticipate reconciling this preference in terms of lexbind
integration? The impression I'm given from the CL ANSI spec is that
the `block'/`return-from' special forms (despite their "non-elegance")
were desirable/needed in lieu of dynamic shadowing other dynamic
shadowing concerns w/re transfer of control on exit, e.g.

Section 3.1.5 "Shadowing" of the Common Lisp ANSI spec:
(URL 
`http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Body/sec_3-1-5.html')

Note, in particular that the above should not be considered without
consideration of the impact this hs w/re to Common Lisps treatment of
Closures and Lexical Binding e.g. the immediately preceding section 3.1.4.

and the X3J13 Exit Extent Issue:

,----
|
|     The extent of an exit is not the same thing as the scope of the
|     designator by which the exit is identified. For example, a BLOCK
|     name has lexical scope but the extent of its exit is dynamic; the
|     scope of a CATCH tag could differ from the extent of the CATCH's
|     return point. (That's part of what is at issue here.)
|
`----
:SEE (URL 
`http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Issues/iss152-writeup.html')

In reading the second link above it's pretty clear that this issue had
an immediate affect on `unwind-protect'. Indeed, to the extent :P this
is so, discussion/dismissals of block/return-from should take into the
historic tension between Maclisp derived lisps dialects and the Scheme
derived lisp dialects around `unwind-protect'.

IOW, It almost certainly wasn't simply as a matter of personal
preference that the Common Lisp people incorporated and subsequently
debated the correct implementation of the things.

> We could also provide (and encourage the use of) Scheme's named-let,
> although it tends to be "too powerful" (not inherently
> tail-recursive, so making it efficient (CPU-wise and
> stack-space-wise) would require a good bit more work).

So, how then is `named-let' a somehow better/cleaner solution than an
alternative first-class implementation of a `block'/`return-from'
regime?

--
/s_P\