summary on issue LOAD-TIME-EVAL

[sandra%defun@cs.utah.edu (Sandra J Loosemore)]

(I've cc'ed this to cl-cleanup, but let's restrict further discussion
on this to cl-compiler, please.)

Here are the results of a poll taken at the Fairfax meeting on the various
alternatives for LOAD-TIME-EVAL.  People were allowed to vote for or
against multiple alternatives.

option				like	hate
----------------------------------------------
remove #, completely		14	8
new special form		19	4
quoted magic token		6	13
do nothing			1	19

Something that came out during the discussion is that these
alternatives are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

Another poll showed that there was general (but possibly uninformed)
opposition to doing anything that would require the interpreter to do
a code-walking prepass to perform processing such as macroexpansion.
(I'd suggest to Pitman that if he wants to pursue this further, he
write it up as a new issue.)

At least one person (Masinter) was of the opinion that it is OK to
allow for some slight differences between compiled and interpreted
code (such as allowing LOAD-TIME-VALUE to do the evaluation more than
once in the interpreter), provided that the possible differences are
well-documented. 

What I plan to do with this issue is to continue working on the two
alternatives that received the most support.  I will put together some
variant of the REVISED-NEW-SPECIAL-FORM proposal I started on earlier,
that decouples LOAD-TIME-VALUE from #, read syntax.  I will prepare a
separate issue to deal with removing #, from the standard language.
This approach would not rule out consideration of some other possible
alternatives later on.  For example, if both proposals are accepted,
it would be possible to introduce another proposal later to re-add #,
to the language and make it a synonym for LOAD-TIME-VALUE.  Or, if
removing #, is rejected, we could still propose to add the quoted
magic token function regardless of what happens to LOAD-TIME-VALUE. 

If anybody thinks that I've misunderstood the general sentiment on
this issue, please speak up *soon*.  I don't want to waste a lot of
time preparing proposals that would not have a reasonable chance of
being accepted. 

-Sandra
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