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yucky package names
- To: common-lisp@SU-AI
 
- Subject: yucky package names
 
- From: David A. Moon <Moon%SCRC-TENEX%MIT-MC@SU-DSN>
 
- Date: Tue, 31 May 1983 07:02:00 -0000
 
Perhaps I haven't grasped the point of the recent discussion, but I
don't see why what the Lisp machine reader does now doesn't satisfy
everyone's needs.  What it does is extremely simple: slashes are allowed
in package names.  That's it.  Any sequence of constituent characters,
including slashified characters, ending in a colon is a package prefix.
The other thing it does is that anything that is a symbol by itself is
still a symbol if it follows a colon.  That is why :|foo| works.
Okay, I admit it: there's a bug.  The printer doesn't remember to put the
slashes in on output, so if you make a package with funny characters in
its name, print symbols from that package with qualified names, and try
to read them back in, you lose.  This should be fixed, of course.