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(autoload 'arc-mode "arc" "Arc mode." t)

1) An easy way to call differing functions based on the data type of an argument (polymorphism). Ruby has a nice approach as shown here (see the section marked 'Duck Typing'): http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ruby/

2) I spent a while chasing a bug in an 'if' statement because I neglected to surround multiple statements with a 'do' statement.

3) It wasn't obvious to me how to build a bitmap array. I naively created an array filled with zeros for each scanline. I would then push this scanline onto another var. But it turned out all of the scanlines pushed this way were pointing to the same scanline. This was a problem until I found out how to copy a var in Arc (use copy!).

4) It's not clear to me how you modularize code, so everything is in one file.

5) Coding style. I have none when it comes to Arc, and there are few examples. For example, I didn't realize that an Arc convention is to append an asterisk to global variables (This follows the Lisp convention I think).

6) Spent time figuring out how to make my vector operations take list arguments without quotes (This was my initiation into the world of macros). Then realized that this was not necessary since these functions would have variables passed in arguments, not literal lists.

7) Errors were not specific (understatement).

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