Sorry, I realized that would confuse things terribly only after posting, and would have edited it into a simple (let x 42..) after the fact to highlight the actual gaffe but decided it would be useful to share what is only coincidentally similar to Arcese in the syntax but identical in spirit.
What was posted was real CL code, but it leverages a sophisticated mechanism known as a reader macro. I imagine there might be similar hijinx in ac.scm supporting the Arc syntax, dunno.
I do not have to type that particular RDF URI very often (done, actually, after three times) so I do not abbreviate (except for the UFB (but let's not digress))).
For the same reason that pg is creating Arc, CL programmers like to take stuff that will be a pain to to type and effectively automate the typing with a reader macro.
The use of the colon to separate the RDF namespace from the specific label is a nice pun the CL usage for its namespace mechanism packages. I got a little inconsistent in my hackery and nicknamed the triple-cells CL package "3C", so if I had to reference the stmt-new function in a different package not using triple-cells I would say (3c:stmt-new...).
