Re: Issue: FUNCTION-COERCE-TIME (Version 2)

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

Well, the main reason why I prefer "AMBITIOUS" to "HYBRID" is that it
seems kind of peculiar to make an exception for the two functions,
SET-MACRO-CHARACTER and SET-DISPATCH-MACRO-CHARACTER.  Besides being
different from all the other functions that take functional arguments,
it makes them different from the pathname functions (which always
coerce non-pathname "pathname" arguments to pathnames) and the package
functions (which always coerce non-package "package" arguments to
packages). 

Also, I disagree that there is no performance penalty, although it's
certainly small in comparison to the rest of the reader's processing.
For example, A-Lisp has a fast, opencoded funcall primitive that it
uses when its argument is guaranteed to be a function, which is *much*
faster than a normal funcall (by a factor of at least 20).

I don't feel really strongly about this -- HYBRID is not really all
that objectionable to me, and I would vote for it if AMBITIOUS is
thrown out. 

-Sandra
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