issue SHARP-COMMA-CONFUSION, version 1

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

Well, you're right that the link between proposals needs to be made explicit.

At the risk of beating an old horse, I think the only way LOAD-TIME-EVAL
can fail to pass is that a technical deadline falls before the polished
wording is achived.  Nevertheless, I would still recommend flusing #, from 
the portable language even if that horrible event occurs.   If we should be
left with neither LOAD-TIME-EVAL nor #, I would claim that we are *still* 
better off than the current situation:

  -- The current situation is that #, is an inherently broken idea,
     never minding that some limited usages of it get around the lack
     of LOAD-TIME-EVAL  (I refer to previous discussion about the
     impossibility of getting a fully consistent definition for #,)
     Praising the portabililty of something that can't work as expected
     even in one implementation does no good to "portability" nor to
     the broken hack.

  -- A bad situation (but possibly preferable to the current) is that
     there is no portable way to do LOAD-TIME-EVAL; no system code would
     be broken by that (I doubt that you are porting the Cloe window
     system to GCL), and few if any portable application programs would
     be broken (remember how Gregor gave up the use of #,).

  -- The better situation is to convince all #, users that any reasonable
     use of it can be covered by LOAD-TIME-EVAL.  Probably unreasonable
     uses can't be converted.  So who cares.  We could give some help to
     Sandra in collecting conversion paradigms for "reasonable" uses.


-- JonL --