Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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Subject: Re: SETF (was Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp))
References: <Cy3E67.42K@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <Cy5Bv7.JDy@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <Cy62A5.5G7@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <CyAM0D.57n@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <CyFE3K.8KL@rheged.dircon.co.uk>
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Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 10:57:55 +0000
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In article <CyFE3K.8KL@rheged.dircon.co.uk>
           simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk "Simon Brooke" writes:

> But there is a fundamental point of philosophy here. My preference is
> that the default way of doing things should be safe but slow, and that
> there should be an alternative, clearly labelled, way of doing the
> quick-and-dirty for people who know what they're about. Perhaps in

Quick and dirty is the way that most programmers I know prefer to do
it. That may be because the code they write is _never_ fast enough.

> some future LisP standard, we might adopt a convention of appending a
> 'D' to the name of a function which destructively modifies its
> arguments, just as we now append a 'P' (or in other LisP family
> languages a '?') to the names of functions which are predicates. Thus
> we might have a pair:

I have no objection to that. When do you think we'll see a Lisp that
uses such a convention? Could it be done in a package for CL, as an
alternative to the standard package for CL names?

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