Issue: DECLARE-MACROS

[Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

I thought that while there were some objections to DECLARE-MACROS the proposal
recieved very strong endorsement from many members of the community. I thought
we needed to address the objections and resubmit it.

Does anyone else have any notes or recollection?

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Date: Mon, 4 Jan 88 22:08 EST
 From: David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
Subject: Re: New issue: FLET-DECLARATIONS
To: Masinter.pa
cc: Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM
In-Reply-To: <880104-170649-2879@Xerox>
Message-ID: <19880105030822.4.MOON@EUPHRATES.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
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    Date: 4 Jan 88 17:06 PST
    From: Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM

    I think we should presume in future cleanup issues that DECLARE-MACROS has
been
    accepted. Your writeup sentence "This rule is required in order to permit
macros
    to expand into DECLARE, as noted above." should probably be changed.

Really?  I had pretty well assumed that DECLARE-MACROS was being withdrawn,
because
so many people had surfaced who depend on macros expanding into declarations, so
that it would be a significant incompatible change.  From a language cleanliness
point of view, I'd like macros not to expand into declarations, but from a
practical
point of view I no longer care; at one point I had mistakenly claimed that this
was
a major source of slowness in our compiler, but that turned out not to be true.
It's related to a source of slowness, and fixing the slowness is made more
complex
by the need to worry about macros expanding into declarations, but removing the
feature from the language really wouldn't help us very much.  I was just
confused
on that point.


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