boole

[MOON at SCRC-TENEX]

    Date: Monday, 19 July 1982  22:48-EDT
    From: Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
    To: Guy.Steele at CMU-10A
    Cc: common-lisp at SU-AI,  Earl A. Killian <Killian at MIT-MULTICS>
    Subject: boole

    You guys are kidding, right?  BOOLE is a hideous function that was only
    kept around so that rasterop harware and suchlike could be used in a
    direct way from within Lisp.  What possible purpose could served by
    extending it to N values?  It is not a stated goal of Common Lisp to
    provide an interpretation for all possible extensions to all possible
    functions.

BOOLE isn't being extended to N arguments (NOT values!).  It has always
taken N arguments (2 or more).  It's well-defined what this means.  I notice
there seems to have been a decision to limit it to 3 arguments in the
Common Lisp subset, which is acceptable if gratuitous.