Re: moving more cl seq/mapping support into core

[Daniel Colascione]

On 10/1/2010 4:42 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     > Those are all rather heavy things by nature, so if the calling
>     > sequence is heavy too, that's ok.
>     > If I added a `remove-if' function I would like it not to be so heavy
>     > to use.
> 
>     You can use compiler-macros (or an equivalent) to create "fast" calls
>     when the keywords involved are known beforehand, as they almost always
>     are.
> 
> Indeed, one could do that.  However, that doesn't mean that it is
> unimportant to choose a good, convenient interface as the one we offer
> and document.

I understood the primary objection to keyword arguments being about
efficiency. Compiler macros solve that problem. If you instead want to
discuss the convenience of keyword arguments --- well, they're hard to
beat. Functions that take a large number of arguments with various
ad-hoc parameter meanings (I'm looking at you, write-region) are a
nightmare to use, and keyword argument would greatly simplify their use
(which is probably why play-sound takes keyword arguments).