> I would once have been offended that Perl provides a grep built-in which
> can be trivially implement in terms of map.  Now, I see this as a very
> useful semantic-level feature,

If you like that kind of "redundancy", Ruby has a lot of it. Oh, by the
way, this is the, hum, Ruby, hum, mailing-list. 

> Amen.  I'm reminded of a comparison I once heard between APL and LISP: 
> "APL is a flawless diamond, perfect, symmetrical, an irreducible whole. 

But it is not. Second-order operators can only be passed built-in
first-order operators. You cannot build your own second-order operators.
Then at least you can write your own first-order operators, with dynamic
scoping. The rest is a bunch of gotos.

matju