kludginess

— ALPHA-ASET checks for a non-quoted first argument. (Presently RABBIT does not allow for computed ASET variables. Since RABBIT was written, such computed variables have in fact been banned from the SCHEME language [Revised Report].) For simplicity, it also does not allow altering a global variable which is the name of a MacLISP primitive. This restriction is related only to the kludginess of the PDP-10 MacLISP SCHEME implementation, and is not an essential problem with the language.