Re: issue COMPILE-ARGUMENT-PROBLEMS

[Dan L. Pierson <pierson@mist.encore.com>]

                                   I would much rather do that than re-open
    the issue (I think our time would be better spent trying to deal with
    the many other unresolved issues we still have pending), but if you 
    feel strongly about this then of course we can go ahead and ask for
    another vote.
    
I don't think the cost of reopening this needs be too great if we do
it right.

    A problem I have with your proposal is that I believe that
    COMPILED-FUNCTION-P must be true of any function returned from
    COMPILE,

As Kent said, an interpreted-only system could make
COMPILED-FUNCTION-P true of every function.

             and that COMPILE must also at least ensure that all macro
    calls in the function have been expanded.  I don't think that allowing
    COMPILE to do nothing when passed an interpreted function is a
    legitimate option. 
    
While I think that this is good guidance, I'm not sure that it has to
be in the standard.  Since Common Lisp interpreters are still legal, I
don't see how a COMPILE that did absolutely nothing to an interpreted
function would break anything (other than some implementors' sense of
taste :-)).

More importantly, I see Kent's point that blindly compiling every
symbol in a package that is FBOUNDP should be safe as critical.  The
ability for both users and programs to use incremental compilation to
speed things up a tremendously valuable facility that we should do
everything in our power to encourage.

    I've actually been trying to draft a short document for Kathy Chapman
    to describe the minimum functionality required for implementations of
    COMPILE and COMPILE-FILE (incorporating Steve's famous "compiler
    model" from last March), but if what's obvious to me isn't obvious to
    other people, I should probably turn at least this one part of the
    writeup into a new issue so we can vote on it formally. 
    
I certainly thing that this committee should have a change to review
such a document.