otherwise in selectq

["David A. Moon" <Moon%SCRC-TENEX@MIT-MC.ARPA>]

I'm not sure why Kent redistributed the enclosed message, since several
people had already replied to it pointing out the nonsensicalness of the
third paragraph, and I (and maybe others?) had already replied to it
explaining that magic syntactic words in special forms, such as OTHERWISE,
are treated like function names rather than as keywords.

    Date: Friday, 11 November 1983, 14:41-EST
    From: David Chapman <Zvona at MIT-OZ>
    Subject: :otherwise
    To: lisp-designers at SCRC-TENEX
    Cc: kmp at MIT-OZ
    ReSent-date: Sat 12 Nov 83 14:17:38-EST
    ReSent-from: KMP%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
    ReSent-to: common-lisp@SU-AI.ARPA
    
    It seems bogus to me that I can't write :otherwise in a selectq.  

    I think that :otherwise should be required.  There are reasonable
    arguments against this.  However, I can't see arguments against
    :otherwise being *allowed*.  If the idea is that it doesn't matter what
    package the ``magic keyword'' (what are these things called, anyway?) is
    in, then that should extend to the keyword package, too.  Unless we are
    moving toward the view that keywords aren't really symbols.

    Speaking of which:  Why are keywords bound to themselves?  Why not
    rather have EVAL and the compiler special-case them as self-quoting?
    (Presumably the compiler already does this for T and NIL.)  Surely this
    would be less overhead.