(defmacro foo (&whole w) ...)

["David A. Moon" <Moon@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Thu, 30 Aug 1984  09:42 EDT
    From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>

    In the current Spice Lisp implementation, &whole sets the same switch
    that &rest does.  This leaves too-few-arguments checking in place, but
    disables too-many-arguments checking.  So if there is an &whole anywhere
    in the arglist, you have to supply at least enough subforms to satisfy
    the required arguments (if any), but you are free to supply extras which
    the user can access by picking apart the &whole argument by hand.  This
    seems intuitively right to me; it would be confusing to require &whole
    and &rest in the same arglist or to special-case the situation where
    &whole appears alone.

    This would give the same results as proposed by Moon, but 

    (defmacro foo (&whole w a) ...)

    would require AT LEAST one subform, not EXACTLY one subform.

It would be okay by me if the language were defined to make this the standard
behavior.