Subject: Re: Finding the arity of a function
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 18:54:31 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3209914469619918@naggum.net>

* Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org>
> 1. `arglist' is what Emacs uses -- `lisp-arglist-command' and
>    `lisp-show-arglist' -- so I would expect that to be what people use.

  Those must be ILISP functions.  For obvious reasons, Franz's ELI uses
  arglist, too, but there is nothing in Emacs Lisp that exports the name
  "arglist" so you can ask for it for an existing function.  Perhaps you
  mean XEmacs, or maybe something has happened in Emacs 21, which I have
  tried to run several times, but I value response times and not crashes.

> 2. out of the 8 implementations I support, 5 use `arglist', 2
>    `function-lambda-list' and 1 something else.

  This is highly irrelevant, IMNSHO.

> 3. this code was released 2-3 years ago, so this incompatible change
>    might break the user code.

  A renaming would obviously not remove the old name.

> So I doubt that the renaming is justified.

  None of the arguments support this conclusion.

> OTOH, I can add
> (setf (fdefinition `function-lambda-list') (fdefinition 'arglist))
> if the users want it.

  I suggets you do it the other way around, after renaming it.

///