Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ptsfa!ames!husc6!ut-sally!utah-cs!defun.utah.edu!shebs
From: shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Structure editors in common lisp
Message-ID: <5172X@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 88 00:00:00 GMT
References: <1487@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <464@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Sender: news@utah-cs.UUCP
Reply-To: shebs%defun.utah.edu.UUCP@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 15

In article <464@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:

>Packages are certainly one aspect of CommonLisp that make incore
>development painful, if not impossible.  Why do they put all SYMBOLS in
>packages?

The truly cynical explanation is that somebody came up with that idea while
working on the MIT Lisp Machine almost a decade ago, and it got enshrined
in CL because the designers were too tired arguing about everything else
to do anything but take the design verbatim.  A less cynical explanation is
that providing lexical environments with export/import operations etc is
not as easy as it sounds, and no one has produced a universally satisfactory
solution as of yet.

								stan shebs