Re: [Axiom-developer] lispdoc

[Martin Rubey]

Ralf Hemmecke <address@hidden> writes:

> see <http://planet.lisp.org>
> 
> I think that won't help me much. But could someone tell me about a few
> conventions used in naming identifiers.
> 
> I already know that |blah| keeps blah from being capitalized, but are the bars
> part of the identifier?

no.

> When do people use identifiers that are surrounded by *, for example
> *default-pathname-defaults*.

*this-is-a-special-variable*

The stars are only a convention, as you noticed already.

A special variable is dynamically scoped - as opposed to the usual lexical
scoping in lisp.  It is introduced via (defvar *this-is-a-special-variable*)

Think of a special variable as a global variable.

> What about a colon in front of an identifier? For example,
> (array-element-type (make-array 10 :element-type 'character))

As far as I know this is also a convention, namely for keyword arguments.

Martin