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From: | Stephen J. Turnbull |
Subject: | Re: /srv/bzr/emacs/trunk r112347: *doc/lispintro/emacs-lisp-intro.texi (defcustom, defun, simplified-beginning-of-buffer, defvar, Building Robots, Review, save-excursion): `defun' and `defcustom' are now macros rather thanspecial forms. (Bug#13853) |
Date: | Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:55:22 +0900 |
Dmitry Gutov writes: > http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Special-Forms.html starts with: > > "Special forms are those expressions in the Lisp language which do not > follow normal rules for evaluation. This is much broader than common usage, though, since it explicitly includes macros. In Commmon Lisp, which has a very narrow (extensional) definition of "special form"[1], it seems to me the intent of the definition is to describe those features of the language which are "unfunctional". > I dunno, calling anything that can be used as a car of an evaluatable > sexp a "function" makes sense in general context. But there's a reason to avoid that usage where possible. In Lisp, functions are "funcall-able", while special operators and macros are not. This makes functions "first class" objects in a way that special operators and macros are not. Footnotes: [1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_ababa.htm#clspecialops
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