issue SHARP-COMMA-CONFUSION, version 1

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

re: [Statistics] I just wasted over an hour of my very valuable time 
    dredging them up. This had better close discussion on this issue:

The "numbers" on total number of symbols elided from the Cloe window
system are indeed impressive; but there are no numbers on "time
wasted" [is it because the sum total of "wasted" time is a truly a
negligible portion of any application's time?]  On the other hand, 
as I said before, the whole question is moot:
  (1) The proposals are to flush sharp-comma, and replace it with the
      non-equivalent LOAD-TIME-EVAL.  So far, no one believes that
      the proposed new feature cannot suffice for their needs, so
      there is no reason to retain the broken sharp-comma.
  (2) The Cloe window system code was surely written with the known 
      availability of sharp-comma; who's to say what the code would
      have looked like had it been written without that availability.
      Would it really have used 26000 spurious symbols? and would
      that be the only source of tens of thousands of spurious symbols
      [Please! don't even spend 60 seconds trying to answer that].
      I know that Lucid Lisp has a step that reclaims several thousand
      symbols, very very few of which were used as "temporary 
      defparameters" (yes, we *have* to do the step, regardless of
      sharp-comma); nevertheless, any such "wasted symbols" could
      be reclaimed by this kind of technique, after the system had 
      been completely loaded and "snapped".

To reiterate my main point, none of these allegations -- substantiated or 
not -- belong in the "Cost to Users" section.  At best they should be put
into the discussion section, where they can continue to foster frutiless 
debates.  This "Cost" section should link to the LOAD-TIME-EVAL issue, 
and assess the cost of conversion to that format; I think Sandra has 
already done a reasonable job of offering a conversion paradigm that will 
fit most cases.


-- JonL --