[More on] Issue: DEFPACKAGE

[Jon L White <edsel!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu>]

There were two more points in your msg of above date that either forgot
something, or else are simply worded in a misleading way:

re: Oh, yes, I had forgotten the argument for allowing symbols as arguments
    when strings would do, so people can write their code in lower case
    even though Common Lisp is an upper case language.  Good point.

My proposed change was not to prohibit symbols as arguments, but rather
to flush the options that _prohibited_ strings (and, of course, add advice
for users to switch to strings if "something seems to be going wrong" with 
packages when symbols are being used as arguments).


re: Okay, you're proposing that :IMPORT-FROM be changed to do something
    different from any of the previous proposals, namely to call
    FIND-SYMBOL instead of INTERN or the secret version of INTERN that ...

This is wrong.  Your message of "Wed, 23 Mar 88 14:49 EST", which was the
presentation of (Version 2), said the following about :IMPORT-FROM (and
:SHADOWING-IMPORT-FROM):

    (:IMPORT-FROM {(package-name {symbol}*)}*)
    (:IMPORT-FROM package-name {symbol}*)
	    Find the specified symbols in the specified packages and import
	    them into the package being defined.  The second syntax is a
	    convenient abbreviation when only one package is specified.
	    Note that only the name of each argument symbol is used.  The
	    actual symbol that gets imported is not necessarily the one
	    given as an argument; it's a symbol with that name accessible in
	    the named package.

"Find the specified symbols" --  not "INTERN".    Maybe the Symbolics 
implementation does call INTERN, and you were thinking of that rather 
than the DEFPACKAGE proposal?



-- JonL --