Re: difficulty of writing translators

[Per Bothner <bothner@cygnus.com>]

> I think Common Lisp defines it as something like
>
>    `((setter f) ,@args value)
> that is, the value is the last argument to the setter function.

Nope.  The new value is the first argument to the stter function
in Common Lisp, as in Kawa, and for the same reason:  The need
to handle functions that take optional, keyword, or rest parameters.
It is easy to prepend an extra required parameter as the new
first parameter to an existing parameter list;  appending a new
argment at the end of a parameter list is much messier, in both
Lisp and Scheme.

	--Per Bothner
Cygnus Solutions     bothner@cygnus.com     http://www.cygnus.com/~bothner