[no subject]

[RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)]

I like KMP's argument syntax suggestion.
It has one disadvantage: OPTIONAL has to be repeated with
each optional variable.  That's cleaner to parse, but painful.
I woudl rather allow just (OPTIONAL) with no variable name
to mean "following variables are optional by default".
Getting rid of AUX variables is ok with me as they can be
turned into a LET* with a trivial change.  It should be
possible to have a TECO macro to do that part just like the rest.

For a change-over period, we could have the &-keywords recognized
with a warning "Do M-X RunKWDCNVConvert Keywords<name of this file> in EMACS
to convert DEFUN syntax".  After a couple of months, this could
also mail a message to BUG-LISPM saying that the file needs to
be fixed by someone.  This would enable the fraction of files
with no maintainer any more to get fixed up.

Even if we never flush the current syntax, it would still be good
to switch to a clean one.