The notion that macro-based substitutions for 'new', and thus unavailable in some contexts, machine instructions are impractical in the 'real world' has become a shibboleth, used to distinguish practical people bent upon 'providing good service' from impractical, ivory-tower theoreticians or, worse, those having ulterior motives.
Schemes like this have a long history. Marx himself was, for example, very sensitive to the logic of his opponents' positions, but his epigoni were and are notorious for instead 'exposing' their opponents' positions as shabby, dishonest rationalizations of ulterior motives. The objection to this sort of rhetoric is that it substitutes catch phrases for thought in a self-perpetuating cycle. CLCL and MVCL are now old enough so that I seldom now hear them deprecated in this way, but arguments that CLC and MVC used iteratively were good enough were still very common ten years ago. Technical problems require technical resolutions. Rhetoric aggravates them. It is both possible and economic to implement macro definitions that simulate a TRTE or any other machine instruction. Efforts to do so are not, I suppose, problem-free; but familiarity with the technology makes such problems eminently tractable. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
