[Dan Carnese <Carnese@SPAR-20.ARPA>: proposal]

[edsel!bhopal!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu (Jon L White)]

One of the good qualities I liked about Mesa (the Xerox answer to Pascal)
was the way programmers were encouraged to write a "defs" file for every
"module" -- basically, this file declares the exportable items, along with 
their syntax (no code, however), and also mentions the importations (a bit 
like CL's REQUIRE).  I don't know how much of a pain it was for programmers 
to produce correct modules under this regimen, but it sure made it a heck 
of a lot easier to read someone else's code.

I, for one, in my regular work wind up reading a lot of other people's 
code; and most of my code is eventually read by other people.  Hence I
would prefer a direction for Common Lisp which facilitated the ability
to read other people's code, even at the expense of some programming
conveniences.  This means that having all the "7 extrememly randoms"
at the beginning of a file (except for PROVIDE) is a much better
solution than having them sprinkled around random other files in 
random other modules.

-- JonL --