A special form is a primitive specially marked so that its arguments are not all evaluated. Most special forms define control structures or perform variable bindings—things which functions cannot do.
Each special form has its own rules for which arguments are evaluated and which are used without evaluation. Whether a particular argument is evaluated may depend on the results of evaluating other arguments.
If an expression’s first symbol is that of a special form, the
expression should follow the rules of that special form; otherwise,
Emacs’s behavior is not well-defined (though it will not crash). For
example, ((lambda (x) x . 3) 4)
contains a subexpression that
begins with lambda
but is not a well-formed lambda
expression, so Emacs may signal an error, or may return 3 or 4 or
nil
, or may behave in other ways.
This predicate tests whether its argument is a special form, and
returns t
if so, nil
otherwise.
Here is a list, in alphabetical order, of all of the special forms in Emacs Lisp with a reference to where each is described.
and
catch
cond
see Conditionals
condition-case
defconst
defvar
function
if
see Conditionals
interactive
see Interactive Call
lambda
let
let*
see Local Variables
or
prog1
prog2
progn
see Sequencing
quote
see Quoting
save-current-buffer
save-excursion
see Excursions
save-restriction
see Narrowing
setq
setq-default
unwind-protect
see Nonlocal Exits
while
see Iteration
Common Lisp note: Here are some comparisons of special forms in GNU Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp.
setq
,if
, andcatch
are special forms in both Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp.save-excursion
is a special form in Emacs Lisp, but doesn’t exist in Common Lisp.throw
is a special form in Common Lisp (because it must be able to throw multiple values), but it is a function in Emacs Lisp (which doesn’t have multiple values).