terminology

[Glenn S. Burke <GSB@MIT-MC>]

I haven't looked through the manual in a while so don't remember
exactly what terminology it uses for these things.  But...  Two of
the terms which I have been asked about many times (with reference to
CLtM, but also to the NIL manual and maybe also Lisp machine lisp
documentation) are "function" and "special form".  Not even including
referential issues ("the name of"), "function" has been taken to mean
those things which you can apply, and sometimes those PLUS macros and
special forms.  The definition of FUNCTIONP does not help things
either.

The use of "form" in special form leads to additional confusion -- is
"(if this that something-else)" a special-form, or is "if" a special
form?  I would much prefer "special operator", although that leads me
to say that "operator" should be used to refer to {special-operators,
macros, functions}.