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Keywords, :Keywords, &More-Keywords
- To: Kent M. Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>
- Subject: Keywords, :Keywords, &More-Keywords
- From: MOON at SCRC-TENEX
- Date: Mon, 16 May 1983 06:47:00 -0000
- Cc: Common-Lisp at SU-AI, JWalker at SCRC-TENEX
- In-reply-to: The message of 15 May 1983 14:40 EDT from Kent M. Pitman <KMP @ MIT-MC>
OTHERWISE is not a keyword for the same reason that DECLARE and
LAMBDA are not keywords. While it isn't a function, and it isn't
a variable, it's still a syntactic word of the Lisp language. Or
maybe it just would look ugly with a colon.
Whether it should be &OPTIONAL or :OPTIONAL is an entirely unrelated
issue. Certainly the reasons why these are different are historical.
I can't defend the choice of &OPTIONAL except to say that if you
were serious about changing this you should have brought it up two
years ago, not a week or two before the final first version of the
manual comes out.
Guy certainly chose the quotation at the front of the manual rather well.