Re: lexbind

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

paul r writes:

 > At the end, what is the "officially recommended" way of defining a
 > local function ?
 >     -   (labels ...) , a macro  coming from cl-macs ?
 > or - (let ((fct (lambda ...))) .) which is not a macro, but is
 > syntaxly less convenient to manipulate?
 > Thanks for your light.

It depends on where you are working.  If you're doing something deep
in the core, then you do not want to require cl-macs (there are ways
to avoid pulling it into the build, but they're fragile and ugly), and
the (let ((fct ...)) ... (funcall fct ...)) idiom may be preferred.

Otherwise, it's a matter of style, and since Stefan says both are OK,
it's up to you.  I've not tried the latter (I usually just use flet
which is a bad habit from my early days, labels is usually more
appropriate for my use), but the `(funcall fct ...)' idiom might be
useful to remind the programmer later that `fct' is local, not global.

Of course if the function is so big that you forget that while reading
it, maybe something else is wrong with the code. :-)