Tasks: A Reminder and Plea

[Guy.Steele at CMU-10A]

At the November meeting, a number of issues were deferred with the
understanding that certain people would make concrete proposals for
consideration and inclusion in the second draft of the manual.  I
promised to get the second draft out in January, and to do that I need
those proposals pretty soon.  I am asking to get them in two weeks (by
January 15).  Ideally they would already be in SCRIBE format, but I'll
settle for any reasonable-looking ASCII file of text approximately in
the style of the manual.  BOLIO files are okay too; I can semi-automate
BOLIO to SCRIBE conversion.  I would prefer not to get rambling prose,
outlines, or sentence fragments; just nice, clean, crisp text that
requires only typographical editing before inclusion in the manual.
(That's the goal, anyway; I realize I may have to do some
industrial-strength editing for consistency.)  A list of the outstanding
tasks follows.

--Guy

GLS: Propose a method for allowing special forms to have a dual
implementation as both a macro (for user and compiler convenience)
and as a fexpr (for interpreter speed).  Create a list of primitive
special forms not easily reducible via macros to other primitives.
As part of this suggest an alternative to FUNCTIONP of two arguments.

MOON: Propose a rigorous mathematical formulation of the treatment
of the optional tolerance-specification argument for MOD and REMAINDER.
(I had a crack at this and couldn't figure it out, though I think I
came close.)

GLS: Propose specifications for lexical catch, especially a good name for it.

Everybody: Propose a clean and consistent declaration system.

MOON/DLW/ALAN: Propose a cleaned-up version of LOOP.  Alter it to handle
most interesting sequence operations gracefully.

SEF: Propose a complete set of keyword-style sequence operations.

GLS: Propose a set of functional-style sequence operations.

GJC/RLB: Polish the VAXMAX proposal for feature sets and #+ syntax.

ALAN: Propose a more extensible character-syntax definition system.

GLS: Propose a set of functions to interface to a filename/pathname
system in the spirit of the LISP Machine's.

LISPM: Propose a new error-handling system.

LISPM: Propose a new package system.