[no subject]

[Kent M. Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>]

    Date:  6 DEC 1980 0626-EST
    From: JONL at MIT-MC (Jon L White)
    Subject: CERROR, and the ubiquitous FORMAT

    True, some error msgs look funny with ~1G~S  and so on in them, but I
    still maintain that forcibly loading in FORMAT is not the solution (for
    MacLISP, that is).  Perhaps we should merely advise novice users to put a
    loading of FORMAT into their LISP init files. What we are doing is 
    protecting MACSYMA and friends from the suffocation of address space.
    Any other opinions on this matter?
-----
I think there's no real excuse for ~nG~S in the middle of a search screen.
It is completely out of key with the rest of Maclisp philosophy -- that things
needed load automatically. Telling people to load FORMAT explicitly is awful.
Rather than funcalling FORMAT, couldn't CERROR funcall the value of some
special variable which was defined to take args like format? That way, systems
could put a tiny SUBR there to fake out the loading of FORMAT if they couldn't
afford the space. In the case of Macsyma, *MFORMAT would nearly work except it
doesn't handle ~G. It probably would be reasonable for us to put in such 
handling.