Re: compile-time effects of top-level forms

[sandra%orion@cs.utah.edu (Sandra J Loosemore)]

I'm afraid that bundling together *all* compiler issues will mean it
will take so long to get agreement that nobody will care any more!  (I
suspect that a lot of us have already reached that stage; I, for one,
certainly have a hard time getting excited about the semantics of
non-top-level DEFMACROs.)  I purposely tried to formulate this proposal
to steer clear of controversial issues and give implementations maximum
freedom.  

What I'm really after is a statement that CL does support -- and will
continue to support -- certain fairly standard programming practices.
To my mind, a partial statement on compiler semantics is better than
none at all.  Since there seems to be such overwhelming agreement with
this proposal (as far as it goes), I don't think it would be
unreasonable to commit to it now, and use it as a starting point for
more sweeping compiler cleanup efforts later (if anybody ever gets
interested).

-Sandra
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