Re: DIGITP and the hair in ROMAN

[Guy.Steele at CMU-10A]

Regarding KMP's response to my response to...:
(a) The reasoning why DIGITP need not return the weight seems to
be circular.  Perhaps I am misunderstanding the intention, but
DIGIT-WEIGHT seemed to be introduced solely so that DIGITP need not
return a weight--and the eexistence of DIGIT-WEIGHT is then said
to justify DIGITP's not having to return a weight!  (I believe CHPROP
originally called for DIGITP to return the weight.  I'm willing to
listen to other arguments for two separate functions, but I haven't
seen a good one yet.)
(b) I am not advocating that ROMAN, or any other weird base, be part
of any character standard or any standard LISP.  It is just that
if the functions are carefully defined to take an optional radix
argument, then it will allow for extensions in the future.  In particular,
I want to allow the possibility that the character codes for digits
may vary with radix or even with font.