Re: negative values for the :COUNT keyord argument

[Scott.Fahlman@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU]

I cannot find anything in the manual that restricts the range of the :COUNT
keyword to non-negative integers, but I'm sure that's what the legal range
would have been if we had been more systematic about specifying these
things.  As it is, a very strict reading of the language in CLtL probably
would imply that a negative count is treated as "remove nothing", though
some might argue that logically this should add a few random occurrences of
what otherwise would have been removed.

I think it's best in such cases to assume that "is an error" is the proper
interpretation.  If you feel that "is an error" is not the right
choice here, a proposal to the X3J13 cleanup committee would be in order.

-- Scott