[no subject]

[David L. Andre <DLA at MIT-EECS>]

Oh, well, I guess I shouldn't send messages when I'm totally burned out,
because you're not the first to say you couldn't read my message...

The difference between the kind of keyword arguments that OPEN takes and
the kind of keyword arguments which other functions such as MAKE-ARRAY,
LOAD-PATCHES, etc use, is that OPEN takes a LIST of keywords, whereas the other
examples take an evaluated &rest arg.  My comment was basically, why don't you
reach some kind of convention in keyword arguments rather than have this difference?

So OPEN would translate to OPENF as follows:

(OPEN "DLA; ILLIT ERATE" '(:NOERROR :READ :BYTE-SIZE 4) 'MY-EXCEPTION-HANDLER)
(OPENF "DLA; ILLIT ERATE"
       ':NOERROR ':READ
       ':BYTE-SIZE 4
       ':EXCEPTION-HANDLER 'MY-EXCEPTION-HANDLER)

Actually, this illustrates yet another inconsistency in keyword arguments, in that
some functions (like LOAD-PATCHES) have keywords which optionally take arguments,
and others (like MAKE-ARRAY) take keywords which ALWAYS take arguments.  I personally
like the "optionally taking arguments", but I've heard differently from others...

		-- Dave
-------