Named registers were introduced by a patch about six years ago (see changelog) to mimic AllegroCL's behavior. To do that, it obviously wasn't necessary to support names other than strings.

I guess a patch allowing other things as names is fine if it doesn't break anything else and follows the usual rules for patches. You'll have to ask Hans.

Cheers, Edi.

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:18 PM, Philipp Marek philipp@marek.priv.at wrote:

Hi,

I wondered why :named-register only allows to use strings as name.

I'd like to use a symbol, or, for macro-generated forms, gensyms, because that would be easier for macro-generated forms to associate with the resulting capture index.

Sadly symbols don't work currently because of COPY-SEQ in METHOD CONVERT-COMPOUND-PARSE-TREE ((EQL :NAMED-REGISTER) T)

Even more, the COPY-SEQ destroys EQuality, so I cannot give some string and look for it later on.

What's the reason for the string-requirement? Could we allow symbols, too?

Thanks for all answers.

Regards,

Phil