[pro] About &aux

[Daniel Weinreb]

I, myself, really dislike &aux.  It has been so long
since I have seen it that I have forgotten that
it even exists.  We never use it; and I should
add that to our style guide.

I don't even like

(let (a b c) ...)

since I prefer to think of "let" in the Scheme sense
of "I am naming the result of a computation."  In
fact, I added a macro to our library that is like
"let" but does not allow the variable to be modified.
(It's not portable; it uses a CCL-specific feature.)

Unfortunately, we do not use it in practice, since
it's so important for code style to be consistent
and it would be very hard to change all our
sources to do this, since it's hard to know from
looking at code whether the "let" variable
ever changes, and we have like 700MLOC
of code in QRes.  I wish Common Lisp had
always had such a feature.

I'm not saying there's no place for let followed
by side effects.  It's just not the way I usually
think of it.

Also, putting things in the parameter list that aren't
parameters just feels weird.

I do not think my own opinions are by any
means "right".  These are just my biases
and preferences.

-- Dan