Re: [alexandria-devel] Review cycle 2: SWITCH, ESCWITCH, and CSWITCH

Random rumination on SWITCH: I think part of the evaluate-or-not confusion comes from C.

There it's common to have #define'd names as keys, which means that non-evaluation of the keys is not an issue.

One option would be to specify that keys must either be non-symbol atoms, or CONSTANTP symbols (evaluated), so

(switch (value) (numeric-constant-1 ...) (numeric-constant-2 ...))

(switch (value :test string-equal) (:keyword-1 ...) (:keyword-2 ...))

and

(define-symbol-macro foobar "foobar")

(switch (value :test equal) ("bar" ...) ("foo" ...) (foobar ...))

would all work nicely, but

(switch (value) (local-var ...))

would not be legal.

The formulation or "non-symbol atom or CONSTANTP symbol" seems pretty arbitrary, though.

Cheers,

-- Nikodemus