[no subject]

[Kent M. Pitman <KMP @ MIT-MC>]

Having watched the mail coming in, I wish to change my vote on 21 (#+/#-)
to concur with EAK and Benson, that features should be allowed to be any
symbol and packageness should matter. Certain important initial features
might want to be global (LISP), I'm not sure about this. But in thinking
back over the problems that happened in the past where several string packages
existed, it seems to me the only reasonable way to handle this is to allow
everyone to name their feature "STRING" and allow the package prefix to have
meaning. This is considerably better than resorting to subtle differences 
in keyword name such as were eventually tried (STRING, STRINGS, ...) and
hoping that no one else tried the same trick you tried. The problem is 
nearly the same as the gensym problem in that you want unique IDs for features,
and it is worse than the gensym problem in that you want to be able to type
the names in. This is one case where, in spite of my dislike for packages
in general, I think they have a place.