Re: left to right order of evaluation

[Guy.Steele@CMU-CS-A.ARPA]

The first full paragraph on page 61 is discussing the application
of a function to arguments, not the evaluation of argument forms
in a function call.  I read this paragraph as dealing with already-evaluated
arguments, saying w
nothing about how the arguments were produced.
I, at least, have understood implicitly that Common Lisp would evaluate
argument forms from left to right, but indeed the manual seems not to
say anything explicit about it directly.  The one reason for not
enforcing this order might be to make life easier for certain
multiprocessing implementations by invalidating programs that depend
on such ordering.  (In most cases I find it is poor style to depend
critically on the left-to-right argument-evaluation ordering.)
All things considered, however, I do not advocate eliminating this
left-to-right ordering from the language if in fact we are all
agreed that such ordering is now in the language definition.
--Guy