Cleanup Issue DEFGENERIC-DECLARE

Category
ADDITION
References
88-002R p.2-27

Problem Description

DEFGENERIC only allows DECLARE to appear once, which is inconsistent with DEFUN, which allows any number of DECLAREs.

This is Symbolics issue #23.

Proposal (ALLOW-MULTIPLE)

Allow the DECLARE option to appear multiple times in a DEFGENERIC form. The multiple declarations are appended together.

Rationale

Programmers rely on the syntactic analogy between DEFGENERIC and DEFUN.

Note that some implementations allow several implementation-dependent declarations in DEFGENERIC, so the list of declarations in a DEFGENERIC could be quite long.

Current Practice

Symbolics Genera 8.0 only allows DECLARE to appear once. Lucid 4.0.0 Beta-1 allows DECLARE to appear multiple times.

Cost to Implementors

Easy.

Cost to Users

None.

Cost of Non-Adoption

DEFGENERIC would be inconsistent with all other forms that allow DECLARE to be used to specify declarations.

Performance Impact

None.

Benefits

More consistent language.

Aesthetics

More consistent language.

Discussion

None.

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