On Fri, Nov 11, 2022, 09:35 Gerd Möllmann wrote: > Richard Stallman writes: > > > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] > > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] > > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > > > > I don't agree. Symbols are at the heart of Lisp. Changing their > > > semantics is a big deal, and as soon as that features is in, it will > be > > > used. > > > > The shorthands feature is already installed, but it doesn't change the > > sematics of symbols. > > I don't agree. Before shorthands, a symbol had one name, after, it can > have many. > This is incorrect. You're confusing the text manifestation of a symbol in a Lisp form before it is read (as in CL:READ) with the symbol itself, which has only one name. This didn't and couldn't change with shorthands. Deciding to use it not use a shorthand is no different from deciding to use or not use package qualification for a symbol in CL packages. Neither changes the name of a symbol, just the manifestation is different. If you force them to be the same thing, then no namespacing symbol is possible at all If you conflate symbol name and symbol designation/manifestation in source files , you'll have problems implementing any package system (CL, shorthands, whatever) and you confuse people trying to understand any Lisp package system, i.e. you confuse this discussion. Let's try to avoid that :)