Re: Issue: FUNCTION-DEFINITION (Version 1)

[masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

After re-reading this for 30 seconds, I'd favor OPTIONAL.


(Well, maybe I actually can't tell the difference between OPTIONAL and
REQUIRED, and "OPTIONAL" sounds better to me. Maybe I'm someone who votes
for a candidate because of his accent.)

I'm a little uneasy about "-DEFINITION", because in the residential
environment biz, the "definition" is the entire DEFUN form, and not just
the lambda expression. 

Is there another postfix you'd also feel comfortable with? You say Many
implementations record this information, but not all that do publish an
interface to extracting the information.

This issue should reference FUNCTION-TYPE as as part of the Problem
Statement say that this is something that people used to do with just plain
old lambda expressions, since after (DEFUN FOO (X) ...) that
(SYMBOL-FUNCTION 'FOO) would frequently return the lambda expression
directly.

Now, with KCL and HP Common Lisp, the expression you get may not match what
you put in, e.g., might have gone thru some kind of preprocessing. (I
think.)

Also, how can the "definition" be a symbol? In CommonLisp?

Didn't we go thru (SETF (SYMBOL-FUNCTION X) 'FROB) before?