Re: On #&optional, etc

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at eazel dot com>]

Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:

> 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.]

Transition should be feasible by just making the #& versions read as
the corresponding keywords, but deprecating this reader extension.
 
> Comments?

As the original author of the optargs packahe, I think it sounds good.

 - Maciej