> I think one of the principal ways CASE was originally intended to be used > was for fast dispatch on symbols or possibly numbers used as typetags in > objects represented as lists, e.g., > (case (car object) > ((node) .....) > ((leaf) .....))
Now that I think about it, I think that I almost never use CASE with something else than symbols and numbers. And the more I think about it (that, is, not a lot though), the more I think that CASE is quite useless, as it could be implemented I guess straightforwardly in terms of COND. I of course do not care if implementations provide CASE as an optimised extension, but I wonder whether CASE is at its right place in the standard. > I believe there are some Schemes, like STALIN, that highly optimize such > CASE expressions. This would be harder to do in a higher-order CASE. Let the implementation provide its own CASE-on-steroids for symbols and numbers? It could even be a SRFI, eh. But I'm definitely going off-topic, so I'll stop here and keep reading what happens here, for it's still full of wise design explanations I never ever considered. Cheers, P! -- Français, English, 日本語, 한국어 _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss