Subject: Re: symbol in macro
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 31 Aug 2002 17:51:14 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3239805074868605@naggum.no>

* Software Scavenger
| but it seems vaguely wrong to me because intern gives me the vague
| impression of being for creating the symbol when it doesn't exist.

  This is just plain wrong.  The purpose of `intern´ is to return the symbol
  with the name you specify.  If the symbol does not exist, is it created.  If
  you really want an existing symbol, use `find-symbol´, instead.

| In my case, the name of the symbol is a constant, known to the macro, and it
| would be an error for the symbol to not exist at macro expansion time.  I
| was vaguely wondering if there was something simpler than intern, something
| read-only, which could use the fact that the symbol name is a constant, even
| though the package is unknown.

  The HyperSpec has a pointer to `find-symbol´ in the entry for `intern´ in
  the See Also section.  Why do you not use the references when they are so
  readily available to you?

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.