From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: getting a full symbol name
Date: 2000/04/28
Message-ID: <3165934902672540@naggum.no>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 616882780
References: <5174E9F018ADFCCC.F6B53EE0A06D6DC9.5CE6E22D206AE3C2@lp.airnews.net> <86hfcni2zq.fsf@g.local> <rB3O4.60$xb5.1783@burlma1-snr2> <3165868104954676@naggum.no> <JmkO4.78$xb5.2804@burlma1-snr2>
mail-copies-to: never
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no
X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 956946682 19877 195.0.192.66 (28 Apr 2000 18:31:22 GMT)
Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 8800 8879; fax: +47 8800 8601; http://www.naggum.no
User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.5
Mime-Version: 1.0
NNTP-Posting-Date: 28 Apr 2000 18:31:22 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

* Barry Margolin <barmar@genuity.net>
| How would a simple rule like "Don't display any package prefix if
| the symbol is in the current package" go against the CL philosophy?
| How does the exception "unless the symbol is in the KEYWORD package"
| really improve things?

  because there are already a number of special cases for the keyword
  package that warrant visual distinction.  if the current package is
  the keyword package, any symbol interned would be a keyword, right?
  I greatly prefer the printer to reflect this fact if it is called to
  print the value of such a symbol.

| As I said, it's so unlikely that anyone would be working in the
| keyword package that this exception would rarely be invoked, so why
| did we create it in the first place?

  I already answered this: to avoid creating a dummy package in
  certain circumstances.

#:Erik