defvar vs setqif..

[D. Goel]

One often finds multiple defvar's for a single variable in libraries
and specially in .emacs ..  This is because people use (defvar 'foo)
at the top-level, when they mean to: (if (unboundp 'foo) (defvar
foo))..    There's no difference but the former affects tags,
find-function etc. etc. when it shouldn't...

An example: my .emacs needs to, say, (add-hook 'foo-mode-hook... ),
but the hook may not be defined, so i (defvar foo-mode-hook) before
this statement. The problem is that this would lead to etags and
find-function marking those places.

If there was a special-form that did exactly what defvar does, hopefully
people would stop using defvar when they didn't mean to...

I would not like if this new special-form started with a 'def'.. because
often it is convenient to ask etags to tag anything starting with
'def..' ... specially useful if you define your own defunn's and
defun-my etc. 

So i was wondering is a special-form like 'setqif' could be provided
whose only difference from 'defvar' is in a name...


D                                  <http://www.glue.umd.edu/~deego/>
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