Issue COMPILER-DIAGNOSTICS, v7

[Kent M Pitman <KMP@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: Sat 31 Dec 88 19:44:13-PST
    From: Kim A. Barrett <IIM@ECLA.USC.EDU>

    ...
    It seems reasonable to give the user a mechanism for controling that kind of
    output too, but I don't really think of such messages as warnings.  NOTICE
    seems like a nice, simple thing to use to say that something is happening but
    you can ignore it if you like, but maybe the name implies more priority than is
    intended.  Maybe some other name?

Part of my objection is that the name NOTICE is too vanilla.
There are other possible meanings and I can see people being bummed
if we use it up.

The Lisp Machine has a thing called a notification. I might be
susceptible to calling the type a NOTIFICATION and making a function
called NOTIFY. Then, at least, there would be current practice behind
the idea.

In another message, you suggested things like
 Compiling FOO.
could be controlled by this, but there's already a competing proposal
for a :PRINT keyword to COMPILE-FILE which would cause that kind of
thing to go to STANDARD-OUTPUT (presumably unconditionally). I don't
want -too- many ways to do the same thing, so we should be careful about
our motivation.

If we made a notification facility, I think it should be done by Cleanup,
not compiler. Then perhaps GC messages could be done using it, and 
the GC-MESSAGES issue (which deals with suppressing such messages) could
be handled as part of the same thing, too.

I don't have time to pursue this further and I can't say for sure that
if someone fleshed this out that I would necessarily support it ... but
I am not unalterably opposed to it if it's done in a way that motivates
its use (and doesn't just go in randomly with not even an initial purpose),
doesn't lock down too many short highly generic names, etc.