Re: Why is FUNC in cl-callf not allowed to be an expression?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> (defmacro gv-place-bind (bindings &rest body)

Hmm... "bind", eh?  I don't think that's different enough.
How 'bout something more like a "gv-alias"?

> Writing the docstring made me thoughtful though - how is this different
> from symbol-macrolet?

Indeed, they're closely related but symbol-macrolet does not "evaluates"
anything at the "binding" site.  Also it can also be used for purposes
different from "places", e.g. to keep a log of all the accessed to
a "variable" (tho, we could just as well create a (journaled PLACE)
pseudo place which would record accesses in the very same way).

Yeah, maybe a "place alias" is a generalization of symbol-macro.

Actually, no: symbol-macro can also expand to other macro-calls which
are supposed to be re-expanded at each use-site, AFAIK, so it can
macro-expand to something different every time the "variable" is
referenced, which is not the case of places, I think.

Maybe people over on comp.lang.lisp (or other Lisp discussion area)
would have some insight about this.

> My second point in this message: thinking once more about callf, we
> could also support a syntax like (callf (with EXPR) PLACE ARG) or
> something like that to support expressions as first arg.

You can already do that, except that `with` is spelled `lambda (it)`:

    (cl-callf (lambda (it) EXPR) PLACE)
  
Notice that the gv-callf we discussed are equivalent to the above rather
than to something where the EXPR is evaluated to decide which function
to call.  To me, the benefit of

    (gv-modify it PLACE EXPR)
    
[with or without the `it`] is that expressions appear in the order in
which they're evaluated, and also that it looks more like `setf`, which
is right since this is about doing a `setf` just with the added twist
that it can refer to the old value of the variable to compute the
new one.


        Stefan