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Issue STANDARD-REPERTOIRE-GRATUITOUS Writeup

Issue:		STANDARD-REPERTOIRE-GRATUITOUS

Forum: Cleanup

References: Character Committee Report, 7/25/89, Proposals 2.2.1 and 2.4.3

Category: Change

Edit history: Version 1, 1/3/90 by Kim A. Barrett

Problem Description

The Character Committee Report Proposal 2.2.1 (passed 3/89) requires

implementations to support and document a STANDARD character subrepertoire,

whose elements are the specified set of characters. This set of characters

corresponds exactly to those characters which are of type STANDARD-CHAR.

The Character Committee Report Proposal 2.4.3 (passed 6/89) states that

every character repertoire name is a type specifier.

Thus we have two atomic type specifiers for precisely the same thing. The

type STANDARD is equivelent to the type STANDARD-CHAR.

Proposal (STANDARD-REPERTOIRE-GRATUITOUS:RENAME):

Change the name of the STANDARD character subrepertoire required by

Character Proposal 2.2.1 to be STANDARD-CHAR.

Rationale:

This removes the duplication.

Current Practice:

Probably none.

Cost to Implementors:

Probably none.

Cost to Users:

Probably none.

Benefits:

Eliminates possible confusion when a person reading some code sees

(TYPEP foo 'STANDARD)

and wonders "STANDARD what? Transmission?"

Discussion:

Pitman and Barrett support this proposal (RENAME).

There was initally some concern that STANDARD-CHAR might not be a valid

repertoire name, but there are no restrictions placed on the names of

repertoires in any of the proposals in the Character Committee Report

dated 7/25/89. There is a footnote (#15) that constrains character

scripts and labels to only use Latin capitals A-Z, hyphen, and digits

0-9, which the name STANDARD-CHAR satisfies. Since this is a footnote,

it can be argued that it has no force anyway.

Unfortunately, this still doesn't remove STANDARD as a defined name

(i.e., exported symbol of the cl package) since it's used by CLOS for

what might be argued to be an equally ungeneric purpose. There's a

fair chance that somebody somewhere along the line is going to get

annoyed by the inter-package sharing that occurs due to this symbol

being present.

-----

Additional comments on the write-up:

Moon (9 Jan 90):

I support this. I think it's only an accident of the process for

amending the character committee's proposals that the duplication

between STANDARD and STANDARD-CHAR was overlooked. Given that we

want to get rid of one of the two duplicate names, it's clear

that STANDARD-CHAR is a better name.


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