CL Symbols - Part 2
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Duane Rettig pointed out to me in an email that my CL Symbols posting did not cover all types of symbols - I had left out compiler-macros. He said:
"I've found out all kinds of interesting things in my work on environments access (which is, even after 7.0 has been released, an ongoing effort). This is especially true in the 'function' namespace, which is not a pure namespace, really, but a number of sub-spaces - for example, a symbol can't represent both a function and a macro, but it can be a compiler-macro and either a function, macro, or special-operator. Also, a symbol can be a special-operator and a macro at the same time. Or, it can have a compiler-macro definition without being fboundp. It is a fairly complex namespace, and interesting to deal with."He also suggested using "Nothing Specific" instead of "Unbound Symbol" since "'Unbound' tends to trigger in my mind 'boundness' (tested by boundp) and it leaves out fboundp (which I usually relate to 'fbound-ness' or 'Funbound' or 'Unbound Function')".
I've updated the original posting to reflect these changes. Thanks Duane!
