[Openmcl-devel] Where is the source of LET* macro

[Arthur Cater]

Oh dear oh dear. I’m sorry I’ve opened a can of worms. I must apologise as I wasn’t looking at the spec, but at CLtL2 which clearly says LET* is a macro.

Personally, I’d never write the code I gave as an example. I totally agree with Shannon, it’s ugly. The reason I asked is because I thought it’d be handy to write a new macro for my own use, and offer it to others, provisionally called LET**. The doc string says

LET** provides a syntax for easily combining functionality of LET* and MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND.
Anything you can say to LET* you can say to LET**, the converse is not true.
…...


So I wanted to make it true that "Anything you can say to LET* you can say to LET**", and this involves handling declarations the same way, and that involves understanding how LET* handles declarations, and that led to asking myself whether it was possible to bind the same name multiple times - thinking I understood LET* expanded into multiple nested LETs. CLtL2 didn’t say yea or nay, so I experimented and CCL said yea. What’s it doing then? What does it expand to? Let’s look at the macro expansion. What, it expands to itself??? Ask my openmcl friends.

And it looks like it’s a can of worms. Just yesterday I was amused to see in somebody’s blog a snapshot of the CLtL2 index  “kludges, 1-971”. 



> On 14 Apr 2023, at 22:01, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:
> 
> I think this is surprisingly underspecified.  I think the only sane answer is that declarations should apply to all the bindings of a given name in a given let* (or other sequential-binding) form.
> 
> It is possible to check this :
> 
> (let (c)
>  (let ((x 1)
>        (x (progn (setf c (lambda () x)) 2))
>    (declare (special x))
>    (values c (lambda () x))))
> 
> (sorry for paren/indentation errors, I'm typing this on a phone).  If the special declaration applies to both bindings then calling either function returned will be an error.  If it applies to only one: which, and why, and why does nothing say?  Either the spec simply omits this crucial information which would be a horrible omission, or the declarations apply to all the bindings.  Or, quite possibly I've just missed the place where it *does* say...
> 
> --tim
> 
>> On 14 Apr 2023, at 21:17, Arthur Cater <arthur.cater at ucd.ie> wrote:
>> 
>> I can only find a define-compiler-macro, I want to see how LET* handle declarations.
>> It surprises me that it is apparently legal to say
>> 
>> ? (let* ((it 7) (it (list it it)) (it (length it))) it)
>> 2
>> ? 
>> 
>> and I wondered how declarations (if present) are treated - but I can’t find the source code.
>> 
>> TIA for any hep