I think the orthogonality principle is a natural default for a
functional programming language and I can't think of a good reason to
depart from that.
It's an excellent guideline, but it doesn't always work in practice.
For example, we're designing arrays at the moment, and there's a real tension
between making them behave as much as possible like sequences, and making them
behave like we would want sequences to behave if we were starting from scratch.
Design is always a matter of finding the best compromises between conflicting
goals.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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