deadlines & priorities

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

At the Kauai meeting it was made clear that anything we don't vote on
by the March meeting won't make it in to the initial draft of the
standard.  That means we essentially have a month and a half left in
which to finish up our remaining issues.  We will have to work very
hard and concentrate on those issues that are most crucial.

In my view, our first concern ought to be clarifying the things that
CLtL leaves unspecified and fixing obvious mistakes, with a somewhat
lower priority to the addition of new features.  Here is a list of the
issues I think we should be working on hardest, grouped from the most
important to the less important.

    COMPILE-ENVIRONMENT-CONSISTENCY
    COMPILER-LET-CONFUSION
    CONSTANT-COMPILABLE-TYPES
    CONSTANT-CIRCULAR-COMPILATION
    EVAL-WHEN-NON-TOP-LEVEL
    DEFINING-MACROS-NON-TOP-LEVEL
    QUOTE-MAY-COPY

    COMPILED-FUNCTION-REQUIREMENTS
    MACRO-ENVIRONMENT-EXTENT
    
    COMPILER-DIAGNOSTICS
    COMPILER-VERBOSITY
    CONSTANT-COLLAPSING

I also think that issues SYNTACTIC-ENVIRONMENT-ACCESS and
MACRO-ENVIRONMENT-CREATOR are very important, but I am not sure
whether we will be able to resolve them in the time we have remaining.
In addition, the CLOS people seem to be assuming that we are going to
say something about using environment objects while making
compile-time side-effects happen, and I am even less certain that we
will be able both determine what it is that they want us to do and
figure out how to specify it in the time we have remaining. 

I have one request to make from all of you.  More than one person has
complained that the discussion lately has been far too rambling, to
the point where people have had a hard time understanding how it
relates to the proposals.  Please, try to keep your comments more
focused on the issues at hand.  In particular, if you have some
particular problem with the proposals, I'd like to see suggestions for
specific wording changes instead of just generic flaming. 

-Sandra
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