And a third alternative is to use dotted pairs for the associations, but my point was that by treating a plain list as alternating keys and values, it plays nice with rest arguments in functions.
Generally, a list may be interpreted in different ways in different situations, and a common complaint about lisp is that you can't tell if a cons cell is supposed to be the starting point of a tree, an assoc list, a sequence, or something else. I think the way to tackle this in Arc should be to make better use of annotations.
A rest argument will always be a plain list without a tag. That's the reason for the suggested interpretation of kvp!b.
Exactly. It's basically a roundabout way of adding keywords into the language. A better idea would be to just add them, and then list-functional notation could be used for something more generally useful.
