Subject: Re: help w/ &key in macros
From: Erik Naggum <cl@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/06/01
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3105679604494591@naggum.no>


* David Bakhash
| I was able to get passed this by doing the following, MUCH simpler trick.
| basically, I used &rest instead of &optional and it works, oddly enough:
| 
| (defmacro f (x &rest y-list &key k1 k2 &aux (y (first y-list)))
|   (...))
| 
| and no destructuring-bind needed.  I guess &rest and &optional read
| parameters differently.  Anyway, just wanted to let you know.  It took me
| a while to figure that out, and I only got there by trial-and-error.

  this shouldn't work.  (f 1 2 :k1 3 :k2 4) should signal an error because
  the number of elements in the list (2 :k1 3 :k2 4) is not a valid plist,
  i.e., does not have an even number of elements, as per the definition of
  &REST with &KEY.  (f 1 :k1 2 :k2 3) should bind Y to :K1.  Allegro CL
  4.3, 4.3.1, and 5.0 concur.  I wonder how you determined that it works.

  you're _much_ better off reading and understanding the standard (or any
  language specification) than spending time on random stabs in any problem
  space -- you'll never know what you hit, nor whether you hit something by
  accident or by design.  worse, more often than not what happens to "work"
  is a special case.  please see the HyperSpec.  if it's too hard to read,
  you need to back off and realize that you shouldn't try to solve the
  problem at hand until you understand what you're doing.  you'll get all
  the help you need here in comp.lang.lisp if you want to understand the
  language (I know I have benefited thusly) instead of just randomly trying
  something and then get yourself in need of help when you're confused.
  more often than not, some minor expectation can block understanding and
  lead you down weird paths (it has happened to me several times), and the
  further you go down that path, especially with code you don't understand
  why doesn't work, the harder it is to recover where you came from and
  give you the guidance you need to choose the right path.

#:Erik
-- 
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