Summary of current issues

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

This is your moderator:

The following issues are currently under discussion:

Proposals 1 - 4 if anyone feels that they were deprived of a chance to
comment on these because of the speed with which they went by.  The
proposals have been sent to the technical committee, but voting will
probably not be completed before the Lisp conference.

Proposals 5 - 14.  I will send out a message on each of these later
today, summarizing as best I can where the debate stands on each of
them.

The proposed changes to the scoping rules for Special and other
declarations.  I will try to formulate the various suggestions into a
couple of specific alternative proposals we can shoot at.

The proposal to eliminate the FIXNUM data type or to hide it in the
SYSTEM package.  I believe that the proponents of this change are now
willing to accept a clearer warning in the new specification about the
portability issues raised by the use of the FIXNUM declaration.  Unless
someone requests an official decision from the technical committee on
this, I propose to drop this issue and retain the status quo (with the
stronger warning).

The proposal to add something like GC and BYE functions to the language.
Many variations on this theme have been proposed.  However, I believe
that there is a substantial body of opposition to the whole idea, on the
grounds that it is very hard to come up with any sort of definition for
these things that makes sense across all implementations, and that these
things are therfore handled better as system-specific environment
extensions, outside the standard.  We have many more essential issues to
discuss now, so I propose to put these issues back on the queue as part
of an item on what environment interface functions we want to have in
the standard, if any.

If there are other things that were touched on in recent debate and that
you want to add to the discussion queue, contact me directly.  Please do
not send new issues to the mailing list directly.

-- Scott