Re: optional parameters

[Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de>]

Jim Blandy writes:
 > 
 > > There's no easy way to do it with stock guile, however, there is an
 > > optinal arguments package that comes with scwm (available on the guile
 > > contrib site, among other places) which provides a `lambda*' macro
 > > that handles optional and keyword arguments.
 > 
 > I hope, eventually, that Guile will have some kind of built-in support
 > for optional and keyword arguments.  I can't say what the syntax of
 > the declarations will be.  However, it's unlikely that the syntax of
 > calls will change much, and we can always implement something like
 > lambda* as a macro on top of whatever primitives we choose, so I'd
 > say, go ahead and use lambda* for now.
 > 

Are optional/keyword arguments stuff like in BOS constructors
(make-object <animal> 'name  "gnu" 'alias (list "wildebeest") 'weight
 500 'height 52 'food "grass" 'horns #t 'home "africa" 'tail "cute"
'favorite-song "The lion sleeps tonight")
which constructs an object of the class <animal> , setting some property slots
(like name, height, weight etc.) to an indicated value, whereas those who are
missing are set to default values, for example wings => #f , eggs => #f  ...?

How would one do stuff like that properly in C wrapper code? 

Is lambda* meant to be completely analogous to let* ?

Klaus Schilling