[r6rs-discuss] Comparison procedures' number of arguments

[Ken Dickey]

On Tuesday 21 October 2008 14:57:19 you wrote:
> > should read:
> >   Ken's definition => "a singleton or empty  list is _not_ ordered".
> >  
>
> And you should be saying "monotonic" or "sorted" as well.

Precisely.  Something that cannot be compared with cannot be ordered or sorted 
so cannot be monotonic [IMHO].

Now for (N < 2) you could return a (prepositional) function which would take 
further numbers and become a preposition which would return a boolean result 
(or raise an exception or halt the machine or ...).  You might think of a 
binary relation which starts out with a negative number of arguments and 
returns (values <OK-so-far-OR-more-needed?> <next>), where you could call  
<next> with further arguments and would get another value pair.  If there 
were not enough arguments (e.g. one argument to a binary predicate) 
then 'more-needed (or some such marker) would be the first result.  If two or 
more arguments, the first result would be a boolean indicating if the result 
so far was monotonic/sorted -- so far.

That would make more sense to me than returning a boolean result to an 
incomplete question.

In a conditional test, multiple values could be accepted and only the first 
one used.  Somehow I suspect  this is a more interesting/complex 
computational model than most Scheme implementers or users are interested in.

Cheers,
-KenD