Package names

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

In my view, if we do this cleverly, users will never see the funny syntax
and will never know the difference. There is no reason not to handle the
general case. Mind you, I'm not trying to protect people, I'm trying to
protect programs. No human should ever write package prefixes with funny
chars, but it's easy (for me at least) to imagine a program doing so and
the seed it uses for package names may for some reason not want to be 
constrained in this way. In this case, as in others, I advocate full
generality precisely so that programs which write programs will not have
to have ugly special cases to get around language glitches. Practically
speaking, though, programs which write programs are becoming more and
more common and the more general the language features, the better we
will be supporting that.  Certainly no tasteful programmer would write
(MAPC #'FOO) when he meant NIL, would he? That's not why we support
such; we support it, for the most part, to save special cases in
programs that might output it.

I am firm in my belief on this general issue that language design has an
obligation to be as regular and general as possible. To avoid going in
circles on this point, I won't bother commenting further on this issue
unless I have something substantively different to say. Mine is just one
person's vote, but it strongly opposes any outcome which disallows certain 
characters in an attempt to make up for ideosyncracies of the particular 
read syntax chosen.
-kmp