Syntactically, those are things that could have been implemented as operators, but aren't, they're just LOOP keywords; lots of functions take keyword arguments

Syntactically, those are things that could have been implemented as operators, but aren't, they're just LOOP keywords; lots of functions take keyword arguments (edit: even if LOOP's are a little different from &key parameters). LOOP avoids using unquoted lists for things other than calling operators. edit: Oh, right, destructuring, too! I guess that also counts. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a macro like this (ignoring that it doesn't enforce any keyword order)? (defmacro for (var &key = (then =) while do) `(do ((,var ,= ,then)) ((not ,while)) ,do))