Issue: EXPORT-IMPORT

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: Wed, 3 Feb 88 11:34 EST
    From: Kent M Pitman <KMP@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

    The dialect of Common Lisp which Paul Robertson (my boss) wrote for the 386,
    and which later became the basis for the Cloe Runtime system (our native 386 Lisp)
    is an example of a Lisp where the implementor assumed that EXPORT was to do
    an implicit import.

That changes the Current Practice picture from what I had thought based
on the proposal and the ensuing discussion, which was that all known
implementations had adopted EXPORT-IMPORT:NO.

However, section 11.4, referenced from the description of EXPORT, is
quite explicit.  At the bottom of CLtL p.177 and the top of p.178, the
operation of EXPORT is described in quite explicit terms that are not
consistent with EXPORT-IMPORT:YES.  Thus I suggest that the
EXPORT-IMPORT issue should be dropped, as there is no ambiguity in the
language definition.  Steele's knuckles should be rapped for writing a
book that contained explicit information which several highly skilled
Lisp experts were unable to find even after repeated readings of the
book.  (No offense.  It's a good book for what it was intended to be,
it's just that we all turned around and asked it to be more.  Blame
all of us old Common Lisp folks for not realizing from the beginning
that a more precise specification would be demanded.)

Aside to Kent: We need to be a little more careful about the phrase "the
Symbolics implementation" in the Current Practice writeups now, since there
is more than one.