error.proposal.9

[David A. Moon <Moon%SCRC-TENEX%MIT-MC@SU-DSN>]

    Date: 16 May 1983 20:43 EDT
    From: Kent M. Pitman <KMP @ MIT-MC>
    How literally do you mean that BREAK should enter the debugger?
Quite literally.

    On Maclisp and even now on the LispM, when you type Break, you are at a place
    where you type s-expressions, not commands.
The BREAK function and the Suspend key (labelled Break on old keyboards)
are not the same.  Indeed I propose to change the BREAK function
incompatibly with Maclisp and Zetalisp.  The name of the function would
have been changed, too, but no one liked any alternative names.

If other implementations want BREAK to go into a read-eval-print loop, I
am amenable to weakening the wording in the manual.  But I think it
would be much better to provide a function specifically for doing a
read-eval-print loop.  BREAK isn't really such a good name for that
function, since if BREAK means anything at all, it means "breakpoint"
which is historically associated with debuggers.