issue IN-PACKAGE-FUNCTIONALITY

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

re: It would be quite nice if the ANSI standard could do without the
    current requirement that LOAD must interleave resolution of symbol 
    references and execution of top level forms.  (p.182)  . . .  
    My impression is that it would be within reason to eliminate this 
    requirement if we adopt DEFPACKAGE.  Has that been considered?

No.  The DEFPACKAGE proposal would have no bearing on this, since
the language is still going to include package effector functions
such as EXPORT, UNINTERN, etc.  [The primary benefit of the DEFPACKAGE
proposal is to help a programmer remember not to "distribute" his
package definitions throught several files, and thus avoid differences
between loading the source and loading the compiled versions.]

As long as packages are really "first class" objects, we will be stuck 
with the problem of sequencing on the package effector operations.
This is independent of whether or not the file being loaded is compiled.

My negative comments (on another issue) about "C-style loading" were
meant to highlight the distinction that LOADing a Lisp file is
semantically equivalent to running a bunch of user programs *** in
order ***; but loading a (compiled) C file is a primitive operation
much below that of the Lisp LOAD.


-- JonL --