Re: for loops

[alan@... (Alan Watson)]

> At one
> hand, it is almost useless to be able to write a nested function without
> access to local variables of the enclosing environment. 

Hmm. I'm not so sure. A number of languages allow nested function, but
within nested function it is only possible to access the current
function's locals and globals. This is a very clean and easy to
understand model, and it has been proven to be useful over a time span
that stretches from BCPL to Python.

You can get around some of the restrictions by providing a few more
builtin-looping functions, such as Python's map, filter, and reduce
(see the "Lambda And Functional Programming Tools" section of
http://www.python.org/doc/tut/tut.html).

My reaction to %foo is that on the whole I'd rather have a simpler
language than a more powerful one.

Alan