Why aren't we all speaking LISP now?

[Greg Ewing]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> Visual Basic is most complex
> here, by having two different kinds of assignments (LET and SET) 
> -- one of the things that give most trouble to VB newbies in my 
> limited experience.

Indeed! My first exposure to VB consisted of cheerfully diving
in without bothering to read any manuals or anything (it's a
Basic dialect, right, how hard can it be?). I kept getting
error messages that said some variable or other "has not been
set".

Not having any reason to suspect the existence of a SET 
statement, I took it to mean that it thought I hadn't assigned 
it a value, even though I manifestly had! Only after much
poring through the help files did I find out about SET,
after which I thought back and realised what the error
message was really telling me.

At that point I cursed profusely at MS twice, first for 
coming up with such an insane language feature, and second
for being so, er, subtle with their error messages.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg