cleanup status

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

Well, for what it's worth, I tend to agree with Masinter on this rather
than KMP.  I think that it is unreasonable to tell implementors to stick
with CLtL and to ignore all the individual proposals that have been
adopted until ANSI and ISO formally adopt a new standard for all of
Common Lisp.  Maybe that has to be our legal position so that this
committee doesn't get sued, but in a rational world (meaning one in
which all the lawyers and those who traffic with them have been killed
off), it would make sense for implementors to track these changes as
they are adopted, or perhaps in discrete batches.  I grant that it is
wrong to pick and choose among these issues; in a given release you
should adopt all of them up to some particular cutoff date, and should
clearly state what you have done.

Most of these items, after all, resolve some ambiguity in CLtL.  To
ignore them is to perpetuate a situation where no standardization
currently exists.  Some others (the error system and CLOS, but also some
smaller ones) address omissions from CLtL that people are dealing with
in various incompatible ways.  In very few cases are we proposing a
truly incompatible change, and where we do it is usually in some case
where the existing situation is unworkable or is incompatible with some
of the above-mentioned extensions.  In each case, we have addressed the
issue of how existing code can be updated to fit into the new system.

Obviously it creates some portability problems if implementations track
these changes with different delays, but I think that the situation we
would get if we advised people to wait a few years until this is done
would be much worse in practice.  I'm not sure what the current official
statement is on when we might expect an official standard or even an
approved draft standard from X3J13, but we can't really expect people to
stand pat until the great day arrives.

-- Scott