Mini-ballot

[Skef Wholey <Wholey at CMU-20C>]

  (A) for #1, the Lisp Machine function specs look OK to me.

  I am attracted to the use of *'s because they emphasize the important events
of binding and refering to dynamic variables.  This emphasis would be lost if
system constants were named in a like manner.  The convention is one that is
certainly worth imitating in user code, as a matter of style.  Constants should
not be named with the * convention for the reason that their values ARE
constant -- no one is likely to clobber them.  Surrounding a name with *'s
makes it possible to determine at a glance whether someone could be clobbering
a variable of yours, or whether you could be tweaking something you shouldn't.

--Skef