[no subject]

[Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW at MIT-AI>]

While we may not need to decide about Maclisp compatibility policy for the
particular proposal you discussed, we do need to worry about whether, for
example, we must not rename PUTPROP to PUT even if it is upward-compatible
because some of us might think that "CL is not a dialect of Lisp" if we are
that far off; there might be other proposals about Maclisp compatibility
that would affect the proposal you mention regardless of the
upward-compatibility of the proposal.

But what is much more imporrant is that there are other issues that will be
affected strongly by our policy, and if we put this off now then it will be
a long time indeed before we see a coherent and accepted CL definition.  We
don't have forever; if this takes too long we will all get bored and forget
about it.  Furthermore, if we come up with a policy later, we'll have to go
back and change some earlier decisions, or else decide that the policy
won't really be followed.  I think we have to get this taken care of
immediately.