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New special form suggestion: LET-CONSTANT
Date: Monday, 3 August 1987 12:07-EDT
From: Barry Margolin <barmar at Think.COM>
Today I noticed myself creating DEFCONSTANTS for symbolic constants that
would only be used by the one function I was writing.
A declaration would be much cleaner; you could still write let-constant
(or constantlet) in terms of it, as well as defconstant for that matter
[(proclaim '(constant ...))].
It seems like a LET-CONSTANT special form, or an &CONSTANT lambda-list
keyword, would be the right thing for this. LET-CONSTANT would be to
DEFPARAMETER what FLET is to DEFUN, and &CONSTANT would be analogous to
&AUX.
Yeah, and how about an &LOGOUT lambda-list keyword, to log out the current
process? Really, although I understand the trivial difference in scope
between LET and &AUX, do we need to continue adding random lambda-list
keywords, which (worse yet) aren't keywords at all?
-- Richard