Mini-ballot

[Glenn S. Burke <GSB at MIT-ML>]

(1) A.

(2) Mostly i just want a decision made on this.  My feelings are,
approximately in decreasing order of strength:
    Specials should be textually distinguishable from non-specials;  this
significantly helps the case of a user blundering into a system variable
(or worse, constant) just by using it as a LOCAL variable;  this problem
is much more common than "redefining" it with DEFVAR.
    Those which are constants should be textually distinguishable
from those which are parameters.  I've gotten rather accustomed to the
"*" package of NIL in this regard.  Using SYS: simply limits the scope
of naming conflicts (as above) to those things which inherit from SYS
by default (depending on how such things work of course).  I could
see SYS:*MOST-POSITIVE-SINGLE-FLOAT* though, for something (parameter
or constant) which is system-dependent.
    Lastly, i feel rather badly about breaking the Maclisp system
parameters like BASE, IBASE, *NOPOINT, PRINLEVEL, etc.  It was only
the possibility that these would break anyway which has kept me from
dyking out SI:STANDARD-INPUT-RADIX and SI:STANDARD-OUTPUT-RADIX from NIL
and reinstalling IBASE and BASE.