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Re:IF-less programming by adobriyan on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:35AM (#4977793)
It is called "special form".

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_aba...

IF can't be implemented as a function because of evaluation rules.

Re:IF-less programming by jeremiep on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:53AM (#4977875)
Ah, that is correct. You can't use if as a first-class function in Lisp.

I still thought you could pass macros around like normal functions in Common-Lisp. The Lisp interpreter I wrote for fun could do that since the function value is resolved before arguments are evaluated for late macro expansions.