Common Lisp feature

[Earl A. Killian <EAK at MIT-MC>]

 From experience trying to get things to work in several different
dialects (or just different operating systems), I think that it
is absolutely imperative that there be a simple way to load
packages (I don't mean the lispm sense) that you depend on, if
they're not already present.  Having to do this by hand with
eval-when, status feature, load, etc. etc. is very painful, very
error prone, and rarely portable (you usually at least have to
add additional conditionals for each new system).

How about
	(REQUIRE name)
which is (compile load eval) and by whatever means locally
appropriate, insures that the features specified by name are
present (probably by loading a fasl file from an implementation
specific directory if name isn't on a features list).  This may
want to be a macro so that name need not be quoted.

It's possible that REQUIRE could be extended to load different
things at compiled and load times (e.g. if you only need
declarations at compile time), but I don't care myself.