Re: Issues: LET-TOP-LEVEL (version 1) vs DEFMACRO-BODY-LEXICAL-ENVIRONMENT

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

    Date: Wed, 09 Mar 88 15:49:01 EST
    From: Dan L. Pierson <pierson@mist>

	Date: Sun, 6 Mar 88 15:41 EST
	From: David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

	If this proposal were presented in its current form, I would oppose it.
	No amount of wording changes would change my position.  I want to see
	a broader proposal.
    
    Does this mean that you would oppose anything that didn't include a
    fixed definition of "top level"?  

I'm not sure.  It may be that a broader proposal that was more explicit about
its scope could still avoid precisely defining "top level", however it does
not seem likely.  I suppose that means the answer is a conditional yes.

				      If so, do you think that such a fix
    is a required part of the standard we're working on or that
    standardizing the status quo is preferable to any halfway measures?  

I don't see how we could standardize the status quo, since nobody seems to
be able to figure out what the status quo is.  I'm not sure what "required"
means in practice.  I suspect a successful standard could continue to
duck the issue of the meaning of "top level"; after all, ducking that
issue hasn't killed the de facto Common Lisp standard.  Obviously, though,
it would be better to tackle the issue.  I would have hoped that the
compiler committee would have solved this issue six months ago, but
unfortunately that committee doesn't seem to do much.