PSL's FOR Macro

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

    How will we know when a Yellow Pages exists?  Presumably it's not enough
    for a random person to declare that it exists and that contributions are
    encouraged and will be made available to the world...

Well, we've begun to gather our locally-produced Lisp packages together
here at CMU.  At present, we have not separated this into portable and
Perq-specific libraries, but we are keeping track of which things claim
to be portable and nearly portable.  When this library stabilizes, it
will be the beginning of a Yellow pages.  I guess it's not official
until some support organization is set up to maintain and distribute
this stuff.

    Question:  would the existing LOOP with hacked syntax be acceptable
    as a standard?  Are there any clauses that are retained for historical
    reasons only, or are all of them frequently enough useful to be
    retained?  The debate of several months ago was pretty anemic -
    does this mean that nobody cares and the unreadable DO + sequence
    functions is popular?

I personally could live with DO forever, but I suspect that if I ever
did start to use the LOOP stuff extensively, I'd get addicted like
everyone else and decide that I couldn't live without it.  However, the
pseudo-English syntax in LOOP still makes me nauseous, and I am deeply
opposed to standardizing on that.

I think that the only solution that is going to fly is to first do a
pass to clean up any known problems with LOOP (as percieved by Symbolics
and others who have been using this package) and then to put this into
the library in two forms: the current pseudo-English version of LOOP and
a functionally identical version with more Lispy syntax, similar to the
PSL FOR macro.  These two forms can coexist for awhile, and then we can
see if people want to standardize on one form or the other.  As long as
there is a simple one-to-one translation between these alternative
surface forms, we can't get into too much trouble doing this.

That would happen a lot quicker if someone were to make available a
public-domain version of LOOP (either syntax) as a starting point.

-- Scott