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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: question for a Common Lisp guru
Message-ID: <1142@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 2-Mar-86 00:33:39 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.1142
Posted: Sun Mar  2 00:33:39 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Mar-86 19:25:01 EST
References: <1829@hammer.UUCP>
Reply-To: barmar@eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Distribution: net
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 24

In article <1829@hammer.UUCP> patcl@hammer.UUCP (Pat Clancy) writes:
>The book Common Lisp (1984) says that "defun", used to
>establish global function definitions, is a macro (p. 67).
>Yet, this doesn't seem possible, as there does not seem to
>be any special form which could be used to implement such
>a macro.

It can expand into
	(setf (symbol-value ...
See the last paragraph of the symbol-function description on page 90 of
the Common Lisp book.

> Also, there are some references in the book to
>"defun" as a special form, although it is not listed
>in the table of all special forms (p. 57). So, is the
>book wrong to define "defun" as a macro, and should it really
>be one of the special forms?

These references are in error, probably left over from the more
Maclisp-like original definition.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar