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Re: Issue: DEFPACKAGE (version 3)
- To: Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>
- Subject: Re: Issue: DEFPACKAGE (version 3)
- From: Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM
- Date: Wed, 28 Sep 88 09:21 PDT
- Cc: Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM, CL-Cleanup@Sail.stanford.edu
- Fcc: BD:>Gregor>mail>outgoing-mail-4.text.newest
- In-reply-to: <8809280541.AA06405@bhopal>
- Line-fold: no
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 88 22:41:16 PDT
From: Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>
Add a DEFPACKAGE macro to the language. It encourages putting the
entire definition of a package in a single place. It also encourages
putting all the package definitions of a program in a single file, which
can be loaded before loading or compiling anything that depends on those
packages. This file can be read in the USER package, avoiding any
package bootstrapping issues.
I think that at least IN-PACKAGE should not accept these options, and
should be used for selection only. The reason is the same as the one
for adding DEFPACKAGE. If you do this to IN-PACKAGE, people will end
up making the same mistake of using in-package with different arguments
in different files of their program.
Also, wherever it currently takes a symbol or a symbol-name (string), it
should just take a string. There are two reasons for this. The first
is simplicity, the current description of what happens with symbols is
confusing. More importantly is current practice. In systems which use
a "structure" editor, forms which take symbols as their argument, and
then change the print-name of those symbols, cause all sorts of
problems. So, at least the import options will cause problems for this
system.
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