Subject: Re: setq x setf
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/06/15
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3170059273480607@naggum.no>

* Philip Lijnzaad <lijnzaad@ebi.ac.uk>
| But SET has been officially deprecated ...

  I think this was a bad idea.  I completely fail to appreciate some
  of the deprecations -- most of them give me this icky Scheme feeling.

  (remove-if-not <obvious-function> ...) is supposed to be inferior to
  (remove-if (complement <obvious-function) ...)?  I'm _so_ thrilled
  with the double negative, already, I really need _complement_!  And
  (set <symbol> <value> is inferior to (setf (symbol-value ...) ...)?
  Gimme a break!

  Deprecation is a signal to the community that it needs to evaluate
  its habits and signal the committee back if it deems them valid.
  For instance, there's no doubt that :test and :test-not had fuzzy
  semantics when combined and non-trivial prophylaxis, but that
  doesn't mean the *-if-not functions suffer similarly fuzziness.

  I use set when I actually have symbols that I don't _want_ to be
  some general data structure.  Symbols are special animals in many
  ways, and I don't want to bury that in a "call" to symbol-value.

#:Erik, ¢2
-- 
  If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.