Programmer Notes

[ELIOT%cs.umass.edu@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA]

When I want to leave a note to myself I include a comment with (...) in it.
This can easilly be found by a program (EMACS/ZWEI) and then I am
even in context where I can do something about it.  Along this line, 
I have often wanted to make the symbol ... be a special symbol which can
always be read, but whose evaluation always signals an error.  In NIL
the symbol ... causes the compiler to bomb, so you can't use it to
indicate unimplemented functions (GJC!).  I think that LISPMs can read
that symbol and do reasonable things with it.  (Make it a special.)

I think that one documentation string is enough, the rest can be
ignored by any sufficiently smart compiler given the semantics of the
language, and anyone who builds a really nice Commmon Lisp environment
is welcome to extend the notion of documentation strings to include
multiple ones.

Most people are, I think, under the impression that documentation strings
can only be supplied once per function and so multiple documentatoin
strings are, de facto, a change to Common Lisp.  This is a very unimportant
kind of thing to worry about, and I suggest it isn't worth it.  I don't
care one way or the other, except that I think we need to have a standard.

A much more important issue is to define a syntactic standard for these kind
of things.  There are several places in CLtL where it is suggested that
some entity fit into a sentence-schema in a certain way. I think that these
guidlines should be made strict requirements, and I think that a good
sentence-schema for documentation strings would be appropriate.


...Now back to important things, like message passing and declaration
scoping=>