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Keywords, :Keywords, &More-Keywords



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.