Re: un-deprecating CL

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

We often add functions to the standard Emacs name space.  Often we add
individual CL facilities to it.  If the function has a simple name,
which doesn't start with the name of its Lisp program, that function
should be documented in the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.

I don't like the idea of documenting all the CL facilities there.  I
don't want to declare them standard without documenting them, either.

An additional reason why I don't want to make them standard parts of
Emacs Lisp is that the CL style of calling conventions does not really
fit with the spirit of Emacs Lisp.

Thus, CL is available for users to use, but not a standard part
of the name space.

One possible alternative is to define these functions with a cl-
prefix, and for callers to use that prefix.  That gets rid of the
namespace issue.  And if we think of them as internal parts of
some Lisp package, they would not have to be in the Lisp Manual.

The only remaining drawback would be that code which uses them may be
somewhat harder to understand, for many users, because they will
use constructs not in the Lisp Manual.

That drawback exists now for the CL macros in programs that load CL at
compile time.  Perhaps the right thing is to move several commonly
used CL constructs into the standard namespace and document them
in the manual.