Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!uwvax!speedy!engber
From: engber@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Mike Engber)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: nested function definitions
Summary: what do they do?
Message-ID: <5862@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 21 Jun 88 00:27:07 GMT
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: engber@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Mike Engber)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 13

What does nesting function definition do in Common Lisp? For example:

(defun cube (x)
 (defun square (x)
  (* x x))
 (* x (square x)))

I saw this style of coding in an article. I played around with it using
Allegro Common Lisp (on a Mac) and it seems to create some sort of closure.
It also seems to me that this is a more inefficient way to do "PASCAL"
style nesting than using FLET. Does anyone what this nesting really does?

-ME