CLHS: Issue STANDARD-REPERTOIRE-GRATUITOUS Writeup

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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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