Issue WITH-COMPILATION-UNIT

[Kim A. Barrett <IIM%ECLA@ECLC.USC.EDU>]

Kent,

Some time back you made a proposal called WITH-COMPILATION-UNIT, which
currently seems to be dying for lack of any interest.  Well, it turns out that
some things I've been thinking about regarding remote environments might best
be handled via such a construct.

What I'd like is to make the syntax of the macro be something like

 WITH-COMPILATION-UNIT var &body body

and add something like the following to it description

 The body is processed with var bound to a compile-time environment.  The
 extent of the environment is the dynamic extent of the form.  This extent also
 applies to any environments made from it (directly or indirectly) by
 AUGMENT-ENVIRONMENT (see Issue SEMANTIC-ENVIRONMENT-ACCESS).

There is a need for some way to specify cleanup forms to be processed on exit.
This possibility was mentioned in your original proposal.

COMPILE-FILE needs a :environment argument.  Without it, there isn't a good way
to inform COMPILE-FILE that there is an outer environment that it should be
refering to (a special doesn't work for the same reason it doesn't work for
things like FIND-CLASS).  Conceivably, COMPILE should also be extended to take
an environment argument, but I'm not sure of the need for it, nor convinced
that it is really desirable.  I'm fairly certain it is not needed for what I'm
trying to accomplish.  Not extending COMPILE this way would prohibit it from
taking part in a compilation unit.

kab
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