Volunteer

[Alan Bawden <ALAN@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>]

    Date: 18 Jun 86  1002 PDT
    From: Dick Gabriel <RPG at SU-AI>
    I will do EVAL-WHEN.

I -think- I'm very interested in the EVAL-WHEN issues.  They seem to be
related to a number of other puzzling problems that have been plaguing the
Lisp world recently, such as the problem of properly scoping the
identifiers returned by a macro, and the problems surrounding ``top-level''
forms.  They all involve the ``meta-processing'' of a program.

As far as I know, no Lisp dialect has ever tried to be careful about the
code that describes this meta-processing.  (Except 3LISP, which I suppose I
will go and look at again, but I don't recall that it seemed like a good
solution the first time I read it.)  It would be nice if CL could get this
right.

Of course it may turn out that this can not be adaquately addressed within
CL, due to other constraints we have already built in to the language, in
which case I would be less interested.  But I'm optimistic.  Unlike the
EuLisp people, I think the CL evaluator is straightforward (boy are they
ever confused about -that-!), so I don't think that it will get in our way
on this one.

So, although I'm perfectly happy for you to get to work on this one,
if you would like to bounce something off of me early in your thinking, you
could be assured of my enthusiasm.