Fairfax meeting summary

[sandra%defun@cs.utah.edu (Sandra J Loosemore)]

Here is a summary of what happened at the Fairfax meeting that affects
the compiler committee.  This is what I have in my notes and if I've
got something confused, feel free to speak up and correct me.

Issues COMPILE-FILE-HANDLING-OF-TOP-LEVEL-FORMS,
EVAL-WHEN-NON-TOP-LEVEL, and DEFINING-MACROS-NON-TOP-LEVEL were tabled
in order to allow time to prepare new proposals.  If new proposals
don't materialize in time for voting at the next meeting, we will vote
on the existing proposals then. 

Issues COMPILE-ARGUMENT-PROBLEMS (with amendment), COMPILE-FILE-PACKAGE
(with wording change suggested by Pitman), OPTIMIZE-DEBUG-INFO, and
PROCLAIM-INLINE-WHERE (with wording change suggested by Slater) were
voted on and accepted.

Two polls were taken on things relating to outstanding issues.  The
first indicated substantial opposition and very little support for
doing anything that would require interpreters to do macroexpansion
and other kinds of syntactic processing in a prepass before doing the
actual evaluation.  Pitman wanted it pointed out that this reflected
people's (possibly) uninformed opinion, however.

The second poll was on the various options for issue LOAD-TIME-EVAL.  I'm
going to address this issue in more detail in a separate message, but
here are the results of the voting.

option				like	hate
----------------------------------------------
remove #, completely		14	8
new special form		19	4
quoted magic token		6	13
do nothing			1	19

I would like to put as many of the remaining issues as we can on a
mail ballot in December.  To do so, the latest we can accept comments
and requests for revisions on those issues is mid-November -- that is,
about a month from now.  I'm going to have to assume that if people on
the compiler committee don't submit their comments in a timely manner,
that implies approval of the way things are going. 

Other specific people I have marked down as doing specific things:

  Pierson, Haflich, Barrett, and Perdue indicated they would try
  to prepare new proposals on the three issues that were tabled.  I
  am expecting that they will either distribute draft versions or give
  up within the next month.

  JonL volunteered to help figure out what compiler support is needed
  by CLOS. 

  Dan Pierson and I are working on the compiler warnings issue.

  The cleanup committee has two issues open that deal with the special
  compiler handling of package functions; I will ask Masinter to keep us
  informed on what happens with them.

-Sandra
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