Issue: REQUIRE-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS (Version 2)

[Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>]

re:  I (KMP) made a note to myself about the fact that we shouldn't encourage
     people to add optional arguments to things -- maybe we should have a 
     policy that vendor extensions to arguments must be by keyword to help 
     avoid and/or detect portability conflicts.

Sounds like good advice.  But the situation re REQUIRE is a bit thornier
since the proposal is to make the incompatible change of flushing the
&optional argument.  I had imagined that Lucid's implementation would
accommodate to this merely by "doing nothing" (except retracting a
bit of documentation); this is so that those few souls here at Lucid
that actually use the second argument wouldn't be inconvenienced.

If your "good advice" about extending a standardized argument spectrum
is adopted seriously, then I don't suppose it would really pose a hardship
on these "few souls" at Lucid to modify their code.


-- JonL --