On second thought, real vs. effective user isn't needed. You can simulate that by encapsulating a suid function inside a non-suid function that checks the current userid and passes it as an argument to the suid function.
You can implement this on top of my given axioms. My system isn't meant to be friendly; it's meant to be the simplest possible building blocks for a friendly system.
That's basically my point: there's no reason to clutter the language semantics with the distinction. The reason I'm discussing implementation is to show that it can still be handled efficiently.
simplicity. I want (and I think I've seen enough examples of code now to write a macro to do so).. I want to be able to say / think / write this:
(if (calculation gives wanted result) (assign calculation to variable)).
saying / thinking / writing your version just puts the language in the way of what I want to write down.. and even though the difference is minimal, all these little kind of things can add up and obfuscate your code.
(store calculation as variable
(if (variable gives wanted result) (assign calculation to another variable))
General idea of the post was just to try and find bits and pieces where the language can be smoothened.
PHP's brokenness doesn't mean Arc has to imitate it. You'd get a vector up until the $a['another metasyntactic variable'] line, at which point it would turn into a hash table with two integer keys and one string key. Asking for $a[2] would always either return nil or throw an exception regardless of whether it was a hash table or a vector at the time.
