compile environment..

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

David,

I think your suggestions are good ones for systems that can provide
these styles of compilation.  I have a quibble or two about the
defaults, and am dubious about providing nay isolation for COMPILE, but
basically something like this would give the user the proper degree of
control.

I guess my preference would be to leave this sort of thing outside the
language standard, but let implementations that can support this stuff
use the same syntax by informal agreement.  It seems to cause a lot of
confusion to put something into the standard but to indicate that it is
optional.  Most of the environment-sensing functions were put into the
book in the spirit of "you don't have to provide this, but if you do it
should look like this".  I get a lot of bug reports from people who
don't understand that some of this stuff is optional.

-- Scott