Re: CommonLisp namespace system (was Re: adding namespaces to emacs-lisp (better elisp?))

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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The dispute about the best order of obarrays does not surprise me.
What I recall, from when we designed the CL package system, is that
no order of search gave good results.  This is because it tries to
use multiple symbols for a job where what's really wanted is
some sort of scoping for the meanings of symbols.

There are cases where this can't work cleanly, mainly because the
obarray has to be chosen when the symbol is read, and what you really
want is to choose later on.

If you want to use symbols of the form foo:bar, I think it
is better to write them as foo:bar all the time.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
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