[no subject]

[Alan Bawden <ALAN at MIT-MC>]

cc: BUG-LISP at MIT-MC, BUG-LISPM at MIT-MC

    Date: 6 FEB 1980 0838-EST
    From: JONL at MIT-MC (Jon L White)

    ...

     A partial solution is for ALAN to re-install DEFSHARP so that any file
    which thinks it needs this security could do its own local definition
    for "#:", and we could propogate a general prohibition for using "#:"
    for anything else until the question has been fully settled.  (By the bye, 
    I'd really like to see DEFSHARP be defaulty loaded - it is now with the
    maclisp SHARPM file).

I really don't see why a special form for defining sharpsign macro
characters is any better than SETSYNTAX-SHARP-MACRO which is a
function that can be called to set up a new sharpsign macro.  When I
originally wrote DEFSHARP for my own sharpsign macro in MacLisp, it
was intended to be an internal convience macro since I was going to be
defining a lot of sharpsign macros at the same time.  I had no
intention that it should escape beyond the bounds of that file.