Macros -> declarations

[Soley@MIT-MC.ARPA]

    Date: Thu, 16 May 1985  22:45 EDT
    From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>
    
    We've kicked this idea around before in various forms, including the use
    of some sort of syntactic marker on special bindings -- something like
    turning FOO into $FOO if the variable is special, or treating the *FOO*
    convention as being a declaration of specialness.  Other lexical Lisps
    have done this sort of thing with no obvious ill effects (and arguably
    some good effects), but it seems to have been too radical a change to
    have been seriously considered by most of the Common Lisp people when
    the language was being designed.

Definitely, a great idea.  But instead, why not just say that all
variables whose printnames start with the characters 'I' through 'N' are
special?  A good extension to tried and true languages. :-)

	-- Richard