READ-AN-DO-FILE-ATTRIBUTES

[Jon White <JLW@SU-AI.ARPA>]

Yes, by "system-supplied", I was proposing this for white pages level on
the next go-around (hopefully, for yellow pages level during the interim --
expecting that interim not to be longer than 2 years).

But I didn'nt mean to imply the Lispm convention of lines with ;;; -*-
when saying "attributes";  I mean the generalized notion of whatever
the agreed-upon convention will be.  This means that merely having
the 7-extremely-randoms in a lisp-like syntax near the beginning of
the file would be fine.  

Moon is disinclined to go for another convention (i.e. something other
than the ;;; -*-), and one can sympathize with him, given the investment
of time etc that Symbolics has in it.  But I don't think it would be so
hard to spec out a lisp-syntax proposal, especially if there were a means
of doing a "limited" READ (i.e., a READ that doesn't swallow more than,
say, 1024 characters.)  It's not just a love of lisp syntax that brings
this matter up, but rather the difficlty of extending the ;;;-*- notation
to meet the increasing number of contextual needs.

-- JonL --