A note on shortcircuiting of argument evaluation in #’

There is an interesting thread in the Clozure Common Lisp development mailing list about argument evaluation in #’<. Until now, CCL was implementing shortcircuiting when evaluating the arguments of #'<. This essentially means that when calling (< 1 3 2 4 5) it would stop before evaluating all the arguments since it wold know it would be false. Just like and. However, as reported in the initial message by Eric Marsden, it violates the Hyperspec (section 3.1.2.1.2.3 Function Forms) since it does not allow this behaviour for functions. The thread got interesting because a small discussion followed if the correct behaviour should be the one shown by CCL and not the one demanded by the Hyperspec. I must say, while reading, my initial reaction was also to consider shortcircuiting as the desired functionality but soon afterwards, you realize that you really don’t want that. The simplest argument is that you don’t want (< x y z) to have a different semantic from (funcall #'< x y z) as Tim Bradshaw rightly pointed out. Consistency is something very good to have and in the end, if you wish lazy semantics, you can always add them yourself in the true Lisp spirit. However, this shows once more how the writers of the Hyperspec got so many things right even if for a moment you might think otherwise. It was an interesting thread to read.