Re: PARSE-BODY

[Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

I am (now) opposed to adding  PARSE-BODY to the Common Lisp standard (as
long as the parse-body option is added to the macro expansion argument
list) for the following reasons:

a) it is of little general utility
Given the addition of &body variables for macros, I can think of no
examples where I would want to directly call parse-body instead of just
using the macro-expansion option. (I currently have lots of examples
that call parse-body, but they're all in macros that could use the new
&body options instead.)

b) it is controversial
While every implementation will have SOMETHING like parse-body (if only
to implement the handing of macro arguments) there seems to be little
agreement on what its arguments might be or what values it might return.
It would seem that every implementation wants something slightly
different (e.g., it depends on whether you cache macro translations as
for whether you want to save the macro translation & the work of
obtaining it or recompute it.)

c) it isn't very simple
(This is isn't a simple argument to make, unfortunately.) The value of
features is inversly proportional to the complexity of their interfaces.
Functions that have a "process-it-this-way-p" arguments and "returns 3
values, but maybe just the first" should be viewed with suspicion, that
they don't represent the "true" interface to what is going on in the
system. That is, "parse-body" is just a piece of some more complex
processing of macros, arguments & bodies that is part of the language
writers toolkit, that isn't very isolated. Motivating it (what's this
for?) would be difficult without a lot more context.