The Environment

["BACH::GREEK" <greek%bach.decnet@hudson.dec.com>]

Gregor has pointed out some of the many problems with writing programs 
that need to understand the current global environment.  There are 
additional problems caused by the separation of global environment from 
compilation environment.  Not that we all agree on how that separation 
should work.

Do y'all think we could get enough concensus on how the environment 
should look to the user so that we could add the appropriate support 
functions to Common LISP?  This would lock in at least basic concepts, 
making it hard to experiment with radically different environments.  But 
that loss might be well worth the gains.

If a concensus is possible, I'd be willing to make a rough proposal 
concerning the representation of symbols attributes and separation of 
global and compiler environments.

- Paul

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