do-xxx-symbols

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

I thought that you had been unusually quiet of late.

    Of course, certain implementations of packages (ones that hash symbols
    redundantly in every package that inherits them, so that INTERN need do only
    a single hash lookup regardless of the length of the use-list) would never
    encounter such bugs.  Perhaps the language should be based on such a simple
    implementation as a standard, and other implementations that try to save
    space are responsible for not deviating from that standard.  Opinions?

I think that requiring adherence to a model that is conceptually simple
but that imposes a very heavy (and in my opinion, unacceptable) cost in
space is the wrong move here, unless you can demonstrate some reasonable
way of adhering to that model without incurring these costs.  To just
asy "it's the implementor's problem" is a good way to either make the
language unusable because of the adherence to impractical models or to
get the implementors to decide to deviate from the standard rather than
pay these costs.

Yes, I know we've done it before in this language, but in a couple of
cases we've come to regret it.

-- Scott