Cleanup Issue STANDARD-REPERTOIRE-GRATUITOUS

Forum
Cleanup
Category
Change
References
Character Committee Report, 7/25/89, Proposals 2.2.1 and 2.4.3
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 (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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