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question about official definition of SETQ in CLtL2 p. 121



    Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 03:08 EST
    From: qobi@unagi.cis.upenn.edu

    SLUG might not be the right forum for this. Could someone please point me to
    the correct mailing list.

    The question is this: What is supposed to be the value returned by
    (SETQ X (VALUES 1 2))?
    CLtL2 p. 121 is ambiguous on this. It says ``SETQ returns the last value
    assigned, that is, the result of the evaluation of its last argument.''
    In this case ``the last value assignned'' is 1 but ``the result of evaluating
    the last argument'' is the multiple value 1 2. So should (SETQ X (VALUES 1 2))
    return the single value 1 or the multiple value 1 2? I'm not asking what
    implementations actually do, I'm asking what the correct interpretation of
    CLtL2 is and whether this is made more explicit in the ANSI draft.
	    Jeff
The corect interpretation is the one which is indeed made more explicit in the
ANSI draft.  In the draft, the value assigned to each var, and the returned value,
are the primary values of the respective forms.  The primary value is defined to be
the first value if there are one or more values, and nil if there are no values.