[Openmcl-devel] Compiler warnings

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 19 Oct 2009, at 21:23, james anderson wrote:

> but, if the implementation is of common lisp, it cannot do this.
> if it does do do this, then all bets are off, as we have entered a
> realm outside of the spec.

I think we all know this.  The point is that it is *useful* to be able  
to do this, and so implementations support this (as extensions to the  
standard, obviously).  They do it in various ways, of which CCL's is  
far from being the worst.  But (as you say) people need to understand  
that this is outside the standard.

I'm pretty sure that there's never been a Lisp in the CL family which  
did not support SETQ at the top level.  Apart from anything else, if  
it's not supported people would immediately impement it in terms of SET.

I also think that implementations should clearly be allowed to support  
top-level-SETQ-of-unbound-names while being conformant otherwise, and  
I think they probably are because a lot of latitude is allowed in the  
way the top-level works.

--tim