Re: what was that LET () for?

[haible (Bruno Haible)]

Don Cohen <donc@ISI.EDU> found the following piece of code in CLISP

  (defmacro with-keyboard (&body body)
    `(LET () (PROGN ,@body))
  )

and asked: BTW, what was that LET () for?

This matters only if a (WITH-KEYBOARD ...) form occurs as a top-level form
in a file (which, I admit, is not likely for this particular macro).
If it expanded to PROGN only, the body forms would be compiled separately
by COMPILE-FILE. Since CLISP's compiler doesn't preserve EQ-ness of
objects across top-level forms, this would be noticeable:

  (WITH-KEYBOARD (setq x #1="foo") (setq y #1#) (print (eq x y)))

would print T when loaded from a .lsp file and NIL when loaded from a .fas
file. The LET () inhibits splitting the body forms and thereby avoids this
difference between interpreted and compiled code.


                    Bruno Haible
                    haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de