Here's what I found in the manual, section 4.1.1:
CL-USER> (defun foo (x) (bar x))
; in: DEFUN FOO
; (BAR X)
;
; caught STYLE-WARNING:
; undefined function: BAR
;
; compilation unit finished
; Undefined function:
; BAR
; caught 1 STYLE-WARNING condition
FOO
CL-USER> (declaim (sb-ext:muffle-conditions style-warning))
; No value
CL-USER> (defun baz (y) (quux y))
BAZ
So you can at least silence the style warnings.
I also thought about how SBCL is handling the evaluation step in the REPL: it compiles the code. So I restarted the inferior lisp process and ran "compile region" on the following two lines:
(defun foo (x) (bar x))
(defun bar (y) (baz y))
and SBCL only complained about baz
, but not about bar
. Are you giving single functions to SBCL or larger chunks?