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Issue DEFGENERIC-DECLARE Writeup

Issue:         DEFGENERIC-DECLARE

References: 88-002R p.2-27

Category: ADDITION

Edit history: 29-Apr-90, Version 1 by Moon

30-Apr-90, Version 2 by Moon (update current practice)

Problem description:

DEFGENERIC only allows DECLARE to appear once, which is inconsistent with

DEFUN, which allows any number of DECLAREs.

This is Symbolics issue #23.

Proposal (DEFGENERIC-DECLARE:ALLOW-MULTIPLE):

Allow the DECLARE option to appear multiple times in a DEFGENERIC form.

The multiple declarations are appended together.

Rationale:

Programmers rely on the syntactic analogy between DEFGENERIC and DEFUN.

Note that some implementations allow several implementation-dependent

declarations in DEFGENERIC, so the list of declarations in a DEFGENERIC

could be quite long.

Current practice:

Symbolics Genera 8.0 only allows DECLARE to appear once.

Lucid 4.0.0 Beta-1 allows DECLARE to appear multiple times.

Cost to Implementors:

Easy.

Cost to Users:

None.

Cost of non-adoption:

DEFGENERIC would be inconsistent with all other forms that allow DECLARE

to be used to specify declarations.

Performance impact:

None.

Benefits:

More consistent language.

Esthetics:

More consistent language.

Discussion:

None.


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