A Bit More on Lambda-List Parsing

["BACH::GREEK" <greek%bach.decnet@hudson.dec.com>]

We've been off the network for a while, so I couldn't get in my two
cents on the issue of lambda lists and their parsing/representation.
If it's officially too late to comment, I apologize.

Why not define a function called PARSE-LAMBDA-LIST which takes
a lambda list and some information about what is allowed in it?
This function would parse the lambda list and return a structure (!).
This structure would contain all of the detailed information about
the lambda list, what was in it, whether &ALLOW-OTHER-KEYS was there,
blah, blah, blah.

There would also be a function that returned the structure describing
the lambda list for a given function (or macro, why not?).  We could
design the structure so that each slot could either contain the
appropriate information or a value meaning "I don't know".  In this
way, implementations which don't remember certain information
could indicate this.

- Paul
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