Re: EQ

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>]

> A good point to make for retention of EQ is that even though portable
> code may not be able to utilize the difference between EQ and EQL, it
> will still be the case that every implementation will have *some*
> function that does address/pointer identity comparison; so we might as 
> well all call it the same thing, so as to minimize the culture shock when
> moving from one implementation to another.

Just so.  While portable code is more important, I don't think we should
discount non-protable code completely.  And I don't think we should force
people to write only portable code.  Besides, using EQ in a portable way
is generally easier than using declarations.

I realize that CL has gone a different way with the generic arithmetic
functions, but the two cases are not identical.  If necessary, I suppose
a more elaborate justification for EQ could be attempted, but is there any
great harm to keeping EQ?