[no subject]

[RG at MIT-AI (Richard Greenblatt)]

  The feature of DEFVAR that it only initializes the variable if
it was previously unbound sometimes leads to hard to find bugs.
I have defined DEFVAR-SETQ in the source which always does a setq if
initialization is given.  Really tho, I think the default should be
the other way, with DEFVAR always doing the initialization, and 
something else doing it only if the variable is unbound.  It
might not be too late to change this, although it would be
moderately painful.