Re: issue COMPILER-VERBOSITY, version 1

[Dan L. Pierson <pierson%mist@multimax.ARPA>]

    Pierson has suggested an entirely different approach -- introducing
    one or more new condition types for informational messages.  This
    could be presented as an alternative proposal on this issue, if he
    cares enough about it to write it up.  Loosemore believes that using
    conditions for this purpose is not appropriate, because this issue
    deals with messages indicating the normal progress of the compiler and
    conditions are supposed to be used to signal exceptional
    (non-ordinary) situations.

On the other hand, conditions are a simple, uniform mechanism with
a well defined interface for users to override the default behavior.
I would like to see Common Lisp start to use mechanisms like
conditions and generic functions instead of yet more ad-hoc special
variables with random, non-user-controllable effects.  This is an area
where we can shrink the complexity of the language while increasing
it's power.

I'll try to get a writeup on my approach out if anyone else is
interested.  It basically consists of a new condition type, call it
INFO, and the statement that the default handler just writes the
message to the same stream as the rest of the compiler output.

All of ERROR, WARNING, NOTICE, and INFO really want to be condition
mixins, but that requires full CLOSification of the Condition System.