Memberp

[Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C>]

The comments that I have received on the MEMBERP issue indicate that,
with the exception of Chuck Hedrick (and RMS himself), none of the
people responsible for Common Lisp implementation efforts believe that
it is a good idea to adopt RMS's changes in MEMBER and friends.  Three
different sets of reasons have been offered by the people responding:

1. People are not convinced that changing MEMBER to use EQL makes
substantially more trouble for RMS and his users than changing MEMBER to
MEMBERP would make for the rest of us, despite RMS's argument that we
could go on using our version of MEMBER.

2. The original reasons why we chose to make this change (regularity in
the choice of names leading to much less confusion in the long run) are
still valid.

3. Frozen is frozen.  It's hard enough to get consensus without
reopening the debate every time someone wakes up and notices something
he doesn't like.

Even if we discount the opinions of the Symbolics people, who might be
imagined to have political reasons for opposing RMS in this, the clear
majority still seems to favor leaving the manual as it is, with MEMBER
using EQL.  As far as I'm concerned, that's the end of it.  I hope that
RMS will choose to remain compatible with Common Lisp despite this
decision, but that's up to him.  All of us have had to make some major
compromises in the course of this effort, and so far everyone has stayed
aboard.

-- Scott