Thanks for the input Joerg. That said I think that there still needs to be a discussion here.
I think that it is important to note that Budden has sufficiently convinced me that this will cause approximately zero symbol collisions because 99% of all Iterate extensions are done by specializing on the keyword options of existing clauses. In fact, in the short term, the only possibility of a collision is if someone decides to declare a clause that explicitly collides with one of Budden's keyword shortcuts, like a (defclause :FOR ...). This is probably not a valid concern. As I stated, the real concern I can see is that this could be the first step down the road to limited extensiblility in the Iterate library. I think that this is a matter of style and consistency, and I'm not sure that style should stop anyone from doing something that would provide a clear benefit. The real question is, will keyword short cuts provide over-all benefit to users or will they be detrimental. Unfortunately, this extension seems to provide a short-term benefit and yet, possibly, a long-term detriment. This seems to come down to a judgement call of the maintainer and the community. Zach On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 6:55 AM, <joerg-cyril.hoe...@t-systems.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I don't know if I qualify as a maintainer, however you'll see from the > ChangeLog that I've spent a lot of effort a few years ago to make > Iterate work in an ANSI-CL environment and fix numerous bugs. > I would not appreciate new developments that kill the original design. > > Zach is very right. Packages are the CL way to have Iterate deal > with extensions. That's why Iterate keys all extensions on symbols. > symbols => packages. > > Iterate is not LOOP. With loop, all clause "keywords" are found flat in the > top-level list, that's why their packages don't matter (except for CL:LOOP). > > Zach suggested >>(iterate:defsynonym :for iterate:for) > Not sure if that works, because of the order of tests in the parser. > It would be a fancy user-level hack. By that I mean it's a nice text > book example, and a user may like it and use it in his/her code. > But don't release code and libraries with that because as Zach pointed > out, it would kill extensibility as several extensions would fight for > the same keyword! > That conflict does not happen with symbols of different packages. > > Paraphrasing KMP, CL is a tool for building large systems. > Don't break that. > > Regards, > Jörg Höhle
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