Re: Issue PROCLAIM-ETC-IN-COMPILE-FILE

[sandra%defun@cs.utah.edu (Sandra J Loosemore)]

To me, the real problem with having DECLARE be meaningful at top-level
is not that it gets special treatment at compile-time, but that it
gets special treatment at run-time.  CLtL explicitly says that "it is
an error to evaluate a declaration", and I think it would be
incredibly ugly for it to be meaningful to evaluate DECLARE in some
cases and have it be an error in others.

I think of DECLARE as being more of a syntactic marker like LAMBDA
than a special form.  I suspect that the reason why it is documented
as a special form has more to do with history than anything else.  It's
useful so you can signal an error if it appears in the wrong place,
but that's about it.

Trying to get this discussion back along more productive lines, does 
anybody have a suggestion for a better name for DEFPROCLAIM?  A look at
the thesaurus came up with "announce" as another synonym for declare or
proclaim, but that might be too generic-sounding.

-Sandra
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