| There's been discussion [1, 2] about html.arc's (peculiar?) construction around stdout rather than function return values. I've been increasingly aware of the problems this poses in my projects and have been considering reworking my html.arc [3] to use return values instead. Before I get too invested in that though, does anyone think I'm chasing a windmill? I think there's pretty broad agreement about the benefits of programming in the functional style in general, but could there be something about html.arc's particular role that makes it unsuitable? If not, then why wasn't it designed that way in the first place? (Are there some real benefits to the stdout-based approach?) Recap: I want to reconstruct html.arc around return values rather than stdout. If I'm running toward a dead end or in the wrong direction and you know it, save me! :P [1] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=5565 [2] http://files.arcfn.com/doc/html.html [3] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12010 |