CERROR, and the ubiquitous FORMAT

[JGA at MIT-MC (John G. Aspinall)]

    Date:  6 DEC 1980 0626-EST
    From: JONL at MIT-MC (Jon L White)

    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
    sloution (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?

 But the point is that an experienced user can recognize ~1G~S as a
part of a format string, and can extract the equivalent information
by a number of indirect means.  Once the novice can recognize a format
string they probably don't need to load FORMAT to figure out what's
going on. 

 The person you hurt with this policy, is the fledgling lisp
programmer who needs to have nastiness like error messages as sugar
coated as possible; - not to be told "... not only do you have an
error, but you can't read the error message because of something
else you don't know about".

 I recognize the address space problem - I've strangled more than
one Macsyma, but as someone who considers himself only a few microns
above the novice level of lisp programming, I don't like the effect
on the present default environment that this has.  Maybe experienced
users (who all have inits, don't they?) should be given an
"anti-autoload" property?

John.