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On #&optional, etc
- To: guile at sources dot redhat dot com
- Subject: On #&optional, etc
- From: Marius Vollmer <mvo at zagadka dot ping dot de>
- Date: 15 Aug 2000 01:08:55 +0200
Hi,
look was Kent Pitman has to say about &optional in Common Lisp.
> Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
> From: Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com>
> Subject: Re: RFC: Lisp/Scheme with less parentheses through Python-like
significant indentation?
> Message-ID: <sfwsns7ltwv.fsf@world.std.com>
> Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 15:54:56 GMT
>
> CL made a horrible error in having the &keywords at all, and Dylan copied the
> idea to #keyword over my offered objections at the appropriate design time.
>
> [...]
>
> In Lisp, for example, (defun foo (x :optional y) ...)
> would have been better than &optional, and would have cleared the namespace
> of an irritating hole that it now has, where some symbols are inelegantly
> dependent on their names.
This reminded me that Guile has in (ice-9 optargs) the special object
#&optional, etc, which are neither symbols nor keywords. I want to
remove them and replace them with proper keywords like #:optional.
[I'll think about a tranbsition mechanism.]
Comments?