Re: Potential issues?

[masinter.PA@Xerox.COM]

Well, my inclination is to concentrate on ambiguities over additions to the
language, except where there is some agreement in current practice.

In the area of read case sensitivity, I remember that we thought about this
issue a lot in Xerox Common Lisp, since we had to support Interlisp too, and
Interlisp was case sensitive. While Franz handles case sensitivity with a global
parameter (or is it a global state), we made it a property of the read table;
that is, the readtable could be a case sensitive or case insensitive readtable.
This preserved the property that *READTABLE* captured the variations in the
behavior of READ. It has not been a formal cleanup issue; if you want to write
one up, READ-CASE-SENSITIVITY is a good name for it.

As for READ-INTERNAL-CASE, its less clear to me what the problem is -- you
mention embarrassment, but that seems to depend too much on the perspective of
the viewer. Are you embarrassed by parentheses? By names like FMAKUNBOUND or
CADADR? 

I think we withdrew PROCLAIM-LEXICAL because we couldn't figure out how to
procede. If you like, I can send you the back-mail on the issue if you want to
see if you can make some progress.

HASH-TABLE-ENTRY-EXTENT: I was expecting that the discussion on Common Lisp
would wind up as a cleanup proposal. Sounds like a good idea. Will you?

Re Symbol-macro-flet: I'm just not convinced of the utility. At least the
compilers I am familiar with go to some lengths to optimize uses of FLET and
LABELS; having another binding mechanism doesn't seem like a step forward. And
SYMBOL-MACRO-LET is under attack. 


Re what the meaning of (MACROLET ((F () 'A)) #'F) might be: I believe this is an
error; I think we might even find enough evidence to convince ourselves that
CLtL says so, and that the editor merely needs make it more carefully worded.