[no subject]

[Don Morrison <Morrison at UTAH-20>]

I'm not convinced  that drastic  renamings (such  as SETF  => SET)  are
impractical.  Just as  you move the  documentation to a  "compatability
appendix", you move  the old  semantics to  a "compatability  package".
Old code must be run with  the reader interning in the MACLISP  package
or the Franz  LISP package, or  whatever.  The only  things which  must
really change  are the  programmers  -- and  I  believe the  effort  of
changing ones thoughts  to a  conceptually simpler LISP  would, in  the
long run, save  programmers time and effort.

There is, however, the problem of  maintenance of old code.  One  would
not like  to  have to  remember  seventeen  dialects of  LISP  just  to
maintain old  code.  But  I suspect  that maintenance  would  naturally
proceed by rewiting large  hunks of code, which  would then be done  in
the "clean" dialect.  LISP code is  not exempt from the usual  folklore
that  tweeking  broken  code  only  makes  it  worse.   This  is   just
conjecture; has experience on the  LISP Machine shown that old  MACLISP
code tends to get rewritten as it needs to change, or does it just  get
tweeked, mostly using those historical  atrocities left in for  MACLISP
compatability?

It would be a shame to  see a standardized Common LISP incorporate  the
same sort of historical  abominations as those  which FORTRAN 77  lives
with.
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