> Does the Common Lisp standard need to be revamped? Probably. It has been nearly twenty years after all! > I remember seeing stuff about CL21 a while back..

> Does the Common Lisp standard need to be revamped? Probably. It has been nearly twenty years after all! > I remember seeing stuff about CL21 a while back... That was mostly one guy’s thoughts, and didn’t meet with universal approval. Here are this guy’s thoughts: - Retain case sensitivity. Remove case-folding. Use lower-case for all symbols in the common-lisp package. Basically, Allegro’s modern mode is the right mode. - Improve, don’t eliminate, pathnames. Standardise their semantics for Unix and Unix-like systems. Bonus points to integrate URLs and pathnames, although … that way may lie madness. - Expand the standard. In 1994 Common Lisp was derided for being a huge language, but compared to languages like Go or Python the library portion of the standard is pretty small. It is probably time to add some TCP & UDP primitives. It is time to settle on some concurrency primitives. And then there are the higher-level things 21st-century programmers take for granted: HTTP clients and servers, Base64, that sort of thing. Maybe specify them in separate optional packages for smaller environments? - Consider CLOSing all the things. Caution: this could be a terrifically bad idea, but … - Consider breaking backward compatibility and settling on one argument order to rule them all. (nth 1 list) and (elt list 1) is a wart. Switching to lower-case raises the possibility of retaining the entire COMMON-LISP package for backwards compatibility here …