Basic Design Questions: function cells

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

    I've gotten several responses (off the record, it appears since they
    were not cc'ed to the common-lisp mailing list) which appear to confirm
    my feeling that the two-cell approach in considered to be very ugly and
    that this decision must have been based on maintaining compatibility
    with existing renditions of Lisp.

I can't very well argue with your anonymous friends, but in my opinion a
Lisp that stores function definitions in value cells is not as good for
serious programming as one that has two distinct name spaces.  As I said
before, this was not just a compatibility issue, at least for some of us.

    Another topic, which along similar
    veins, appears to hold a consensus is that the multitude of functions
    within CL which "only work for global (special) variables and not for
    lexically bound variables" and vice-versa is also clumsy in appearance.
    Would someone care to explain why it was necessary to devise two-sets of
    functions for what (being rather naive, I would think) could have been
    combined into one more consistent set?

I have no idea what you're talking about.  The only such function I can
think of is PROGV, and that couldn't work for lexical variables.

Gee, I'm sounding almost as grumpy as Moon today...

-- Scott