--- Raymond Toy wrote:
> If you look many files with declare-top at the top also have
> declare-top at the bottom. The one at the top declares some
> variables as special and then at the bottom makes some not special
> anymore.
>
> But this isn't possible in Common Lisp. Once special, it's forever
> special.
Erm. I suppose since I don't properly understand what "special" means
in lisp (I'm looking around, but it hasn't sunk in yet) I may be
worrying about nothing, but if nothing else shouldn't this be on our
"clean up" list? Presumably if the original coders wanted them special
globally they could have done that, so what were they trying to
accomplish by unspecial? The closest I've come so far to understanding
what special means is that it's a global variable which is only legal
to refer to if it is bound (has a value) but I suppose that's
incorrect. I must confess I really don't understand their use in the
current (almost) one package setup, since everything is accessable to
everything else in that setup.
Guess it's time to hit PCL again...
> Also a peek at the declare-top macro seems to indicate that only the
> special and unspecial declarations are used. And unspecial is only
> applicable to gcl and acl (excl).
Hmm. Weird. OK, thanks Ray! I'll keep digging to see if I can make
sense out of it.
Cheers,
CY
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