GC, exit-to-system

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

I agree that many of these functions (BYE, ROOM, ED) are more for
portable programmers than for portable programs.  That doesn't mean that
they are a bad thing; it just means that we have to carefully indicate
what they are and are not required to do and what happens on systems
where they make no sense.  It's nice to be able to go up to a strange
Common Lisp and know in general how to do the most important top-level
things.  GC is perhaps unusual, since it does have some uses in code, as
several of us have indicated.

As to your specific proposed changes, I don't like either of them.
What's wrong with calling the GC function "GC"?  Most Common Lisps
already support this, and call it "GC".  (Systems could define their own
keyword arguments for this to get more subtle system-dependent effects.)

As for "BYE", I think that it should be documented as leaving the Lisp
altogether, if that makes sense.  Bringing in the idea of leaving the
current top-level loop complicates things immensely because it interacts
with nested break levels and stack groups and all sorts of other
non-standard things.

-- Scott