3 ms·

I wonder if there wasn't some reluctance to use easy Scheme-provided functions? There are several places like this where Arc does something "the hard way" by u

• jgrahamc 19y ago
  That seems fair enough, if I was doing Arc then I'd want to define as much as I could in Arc so that porting it would be easy (and also to prove the expressiveness of the 'simpler' parts of the language). In this case you need access to date information and currently that's done by assuming that it's ok to (system) to GNU date. That's a big assumption. I think it would be fairly easy to wrap up the Scheme code into an Arc native definition. For example, Arc defined seconds to be the current Unix epoch (which is does via Scheme's current-seconds). It would be pretty easy to do the same thing for month, day, year and make them primitive and then write date on top of them entirely in Arc.