Re: Issue: TRACE-ERROR (Version 1)

[masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

I would like to separate out, if possible, the requirement for conformance --
what it is you have to have to say that you have ANSI Common Lisp -- and the
strong recommendations the standard might make for having an acceptable
environment. This issue is in many ways like IF-BODY; it attempts to put some
constraints on things that implementations do that aren't part of the standard
anyway.

I don't know for sure that there is precedent, but I vaguely remember some
similar wording in other standards documents. I'd like to see the only
"standard" for ED, TRACE, BREAK and the other "environment" features be that
they exist in the Lisp package and that the implementations document what they
do; secondly, we can strongly *recommend* (maybe in the notes) that TRACE do
error checking and that DRIBBLE change the current *terminal-io* rather than
work with an embedded top-level loop.

We certainly gutted DRIBBLE, I don't know why we should turn around and tighten
up TRACE.