Overconservatism in extensions

[Alan Bawden <ALAN at MIT-MC>]

    Date: 15 October 1982 1513-EDT (Friday)
    From: The Great Quux at CMU-10A
    Sender: Guy.Steele at CMU-10A

    Perhaps we need a predicate GARBAGEP that takes a string.  For example,
    	(GARBAGEP "I think GCD should accept complex numbers...") => T.

NO!  This is not a garbage string!  GCD should certainly work on complex
integers.  It is completely consistent to extend GCD in this manner, and I
certainly expected that we would.  It's not even hard.

Or is there some more subtle joke here that I don't understand?  You'll
pardon my confusion, but it seems equally plausible that this is a joke
that I don't appreciate, or that Steele didn't think too hard about an
example of a braindamaged idea.