Re: Issue: HASH-TABLE-PACKAGE-GENERATORS

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

    Date: 16 Sep 88 01:55 PDT
    From: masinter.pa@Xerox.COM

    There was an interesting interchange on this proposal back in May, but no good
    resolution. Would someone care to review the messages and extract a revised
    proposal? I think we can't ignore locking because there is a way to implement
    iterators without locking. Moon says "You need to be able to wrap something
    around the whole iteration,
    not merely have a function that performs the next step in the iteration...."

JonL and I are having a private discussion about this.

    Or is this issue moot? E.g., if implementations are required to provide LOOP and
    OSS (even as a loadable libraries), is there any purpose served in also making
    the lowlevel mechanism visible?

Yes.  It's clear that the community is not going to agree on one single
iteration language, which makes it likely that ongoing research on ways
of expressing iteration will continue.  Having a standard low-level
mechanism so that the "blessed" iteration packages can be written in a
portable way, but refusing to publish its name, would be an unwarranted
deprecation of ongoing research.