SHADOW et. al

[Brad Miller <miller@DOUGHNUT.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>]

Actually this discussion of shadow brings to mind a problem I have had with CL
packages, which deals with just what symbol you get...

Lets presume that the symbol FOO exists in 3 places, packages A B and C...

I create package D which will :USE A B C.

Which foo does it get? well, probably it will complain, and force you to
shadowing-import one of them. What I would sort of like to see (others
probably know more about the issues here than I do) is that the USE list of a
package is also the order in which the packages are searched to resolve symbol
references. Thus in the above example, a reference to FOO in D would be
resolved as A::FOO with *no complaint* about the duplicates in B and C.

For debugging purposes, there can be some special the package system uses to
complain about duplicates as in the above, what I want is a mechanism such
that there is a default, normal, behavior for such things, which allows this
duplication.

Brad Miller
------
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...[allegra|seismo]!rochester!miller}
Brad Miller
University of Rochester Computer Science Department

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