a few expansion ideas on use cases for demonstrated capabilities

[wmannis]

Now that I've made one pull request I've got the cookbook on my mind, and a few smaller items occur to me, but I wanted input first.

While the point of the cookbook is explicitly to avoid discussing the Deep Magic, there are a few sections where I think a little more guidance on why you might choose something could be helpful.

1. What are the use cases for let over defun — encapsulation across a few functions to avoid globals, generators. Just demonstrating a lexical closure might not say enough.
2. What are other uses cases for values? CL itself offers clues: round, truncate, etc.; distinguishing a failed lookup from a nil value.
3. If you're doing a lot of setting and getting on structs, symbol-macrolet is probably your friend (which is what with-slots expands to for classes).

I assume it makes most sense to do each of these separately, do deal with feedback.

[vindarel]

I've got the cookbook on my mind

yay

let over defun

you mean over defvar or defparameter? These are not explained, I still want to add a page about variables.

values

more examples welcome

symbol-macrolet

this isn't covered, so a section on it is welcome.

[wmannis]

you mean over defvar or defparameter? These are not explained, I still want to add a page about variables.

Sorry, I mean closures:

(let ((n 0))
  (defun counter () (incf n)))

Most examples look a lot like that use case.

[vindarel]

oh right. Closures are mentioned in the Functions chapter, but quickly, we end with "See more on PCL" :D

[vindarel]

Keep your eyes open and the markdown files open! realizes you used the GitHub editor

[wmannis]

I would never edit code that way, but it's a convenient markdown preview.