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Issue: PATHNAME-SYMBOL (Version 2)



The grinding of the PATHNAME-SYMBOL proposal needs to be cleaned up.

It came through looking like this to me:

 ...
 Rationale:

 The feature of accepting a symbol was copied by Common Lisp from
 Zetalisp,
 which in turn copied it from Maclisp.  The reason Maclisp allowed a
 symbol
 here was that it did not have strings at all.  However, the feature has
 been
 long since removed from Zetalisp, since it was found to be a source of
 bugs
 ...

Also, I find the treatment of LOAD is not uniformly carried through.
For example, the proposal mentions LOAD at one point under conversion
cost. It may want to mention it under aesthetics, too. But in any case,
it should surely state definitively that LOAD is affected in the Proposal
and the References.

By the way, in the Symbolics release I'm using (7.1) allows (LOAD 'symbol)
so the comment saying we've long since flushed the feature is not completely
accurate. It may be that Moon didn't mean to include LOAD, in which case
the discussion should be phrased to make it clear that LOAD is not intended.

I think this will be a likely source of grumbling at X3J13; we might as
well head it off early. I won't vote to release this until the wording is
made to treat LOAD clearly.