Re: Issue: TAILP-NIL (Version 5)

[masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

For the record, re: whether the following sentence is Irrelevant,
Inflammatory, Unfounded, Shooting in the Dark

<< It was suggested more than once by more than one cleanup 
committee member that we remove TAILP from the language
"since almost nobody uses it". >>

It is relevant, since it is an alternate solution to the proposal.
It is inflammatory, evidenced by your flame.
It is not unfounded; I have two messages, one from Moon and one from JonL,
that mention removing TAILP from the language as a serious possibility,
although only one of them used the phrase "since almost nobody uses it".
Perhaps you could search through your local sources for calls to TAILP?
As for "shooting in the dark", that's likely.


However, we did not go so far as to present the proposal of removing TAILP
as a serious contender, because we realized the cost of incompatible
changes. I think if I were designing a good lisp from scratch I might put
TAILP low in the list of priorities of things to add, but taking it out has
high cost and almost no benefit. 

Your two suggestions (expand the proposal to deal with LDIFF, possibly add
a :TEST argument) may have gotten lost.