Subject: Re: Byte code compilers...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1995/09/19
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <19950919T173608Z@naggum.no>

[Marty Hall]

|   XEmacs 19.13 also has CL-style backquote in the default environment.

so did Emacs 19.29 (released 1995-06-21).

|   Finally, XEmacs lets you do #'(lambda ...) so that the lambda gets
|   byte-compiled, but you still don't get closures, and #'foo looks up the
|   definition of foo at runtime, unlike in CL where you get the definition
|   at compile time.

I didn't know that XEmacs had #'.  I proposed adding it to Emacs because I
wanted to make it easier to make lambda forms compilable (seeing how so few
Emacs Lisp programmers know how to do this right).  RMS convinced me it was
not a good idea when I admitted that #'foo meant (symbol-function 'foo) in
CL and not in the proposed Emacs syntax change.  however, this is not an
entirely sound argument.  (function 'foo) in Emacs and Common Lisp is the
real difference, while #'foo would mean (function 'foo) in both syntaxes.

#<Erik 3020520968>
-- 
there's a car that has more computing power than it took to get man
to the moon: the BMW 750.  but _you_ are stuck here on earth.  haha.