Revenge of the Ballot

[Glenn S. Burke <GSB @ MIT-ML>]

B1, B2, B4, B5, and B6, are acceptable to me.  (I do not claim
particular mathematical competence however.  And, B4a brings up some
of the issues which were discussed privately with respect to
nth-value, but i'm willing to believe that most of the time both
values will be used.)
B3. Yes, gross as multiple-value-psetq might be.  If we are going to
    call it multiple-value-setq, we should do it up consistently.
B7. CONVENTION.
    Probably not a good idea.
    I think Moon said everything for on this topic.  The NIL pathname
code is modeled pretty much after the Lisp machine code.  It is in
fact modularized such that the stuff which is applicable to a
particular "convention" (in our simplified case, VMS FILES-11) is
totally distinct from the other stuff which knows how to open streams
etc.  Similarly, i will be adding TOPS-20 and ITS "conventions" so
that we can get on with having NIL read files over the chaos net.
    I could see having a pathname-convention function, but i'm not
sure that it is reasonable to do so unless at least some of the
possible returned values are standardized, and there might be
additional hair of some "conventions" being "subconventions" of
others.