Francis Carr: I don't know who are you talking to, but I can give you few answers anyway.
>collections of multiply-recursive functions (which get used very frequently -- >by no means is it an uncommon situation, as you suggest in your initial post),< They may be frequent in Scheme (because it's often used as an almost pure language), but in Python code they are quite rare. I have used two mutual recursive functions only once in non-toy Python code in two or more years. >Yet -- scheme does not provide out-of-the-box support for your proposed >"let-a-function-implicitly- refer-to-itself" idea. This suggests that the >idea itself runs counter to more important aspects of a programming language.< I see. It's not a very implicit thing, because you have to call a function anyway, it's just it has a fixed name, like __func__. I think it doesn't runs counter to Python & D languages (I have asked for a similar feature in D2 too, and the designers seem to have accepted the idea, already suggested there by another person in the past). Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list