Left to right, or parallel, evaluation of arguments to function?

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

Evaluation of arguments is definitely intended to be left-to-right.  The
only argument is about whether the manual actually comes out and says
this (I think it does) or whether it just hints at this.  In the latter
case, the omission is just an oversight.

It is not a goal of Common Lisp to be a good language for dataflow or
other statement-level parallel architectures.  There's no clear
consensus on what the right set of features for a dataflow language
would be, but Common Lisp, even if we loosened up the rules on argument
evaluation, would not be the right thing.  It seems silly to include
some feature just because it makes Common Lisp slightly less bad at
doing something it is not intended to do anyway, so we went with Lisp
tradition in requiring left-to-right evaluation.

-- Scott