Then let's do it :-)

In ac.scm, we change the xdef of 'table, and the def of 'fill-table (which doesn't seem to be used anymore) to work with a normal list (and not an alist).

   (xdef table (lambda args
	         (let ((h (make-hash-table 'equal)))
		   (if (pair? args)
		       (if (pair? (cdr args))
			   (fill-table h args)
			   ((car args) h)))
		   h)))

   (define (fill-table h lst)
     (if (pair? lst)
         (begin (hash-table-put! h (car lst) (cadr lst))
	        (fill-table h (cddr lst)))
         h))

  arc> (table)
  #hash()
  arc> (table [for i 0 3 (= _.i 42)])
  #hash((3 . 42) (0 . 42) (1 . 42) (2 . 42))
  arc> (table 'a 2 'b 42)
  #hash((b . 42) (a . 2))

> Thanks much for your detailed and informative reply.

Thanks go to you for having a fresh view on the data structures of Arc, and questioning them. I was just "quoting the manual" and this is not hard.

----

To absz: thanks for mentioning "DWIM", I didn't know this acronym but this is exactly what I expect from a (programming) language. It is what differenciates a language from a (formal) notation IMO. Funny point, the (french) wikipedia article uses Perl as a DWIM-oriented language example :-)

Interesting that Thaddeus (http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=10533) makes a mistake using 'obj / wants 'inst to work w/ 'obj. This comforts me in the idea that 'obj is confusing. People expects an "object" to do magic (inheritance, instanciation, etc), to be high-level, where they just expect an (hash)"table" to be a simple key/value store.

Maybe (xdef new-table (lambda () (make-hash-table 'equal)), and then use the raw 'new-table and 'fill-table, 'listtab, 'tablist and co. to define a DWIM 'table in Arc.

Or maybe it's crap because DWIM is crap by nature and it's better to have (to know) 'table, 'obj, 'fill-table, etc.