package frenzy

Hello all!

I'm experiencing some problems using packages in Lisp and I'm wondering what your opinions are about the packages-facility in Lisp. I've been hearing around and most of my comrades suggest not to use packages. I'd like to use them to avoid nasty things like name-clashes (that's what they're for, right?). Is there any guide on how packages should be used?

Description of the problem I ran into:

Let's say I have some package :exporting-package, which has two functions: ep-internal-fn and ep-external-fn. The ep-internal-fn gets a string as argument and returns a symbol using (read-line str NIL NIL). The ep-external-fn uses eq to compare the result of ep-internal-fn with a pre-programmed symbol 'TEST. The ep-external-fn is exported.

Now another package is defined :importing-package which uses the :exporting-package (use-package). When ep-external-fn is called, the equality is always false. This happens because the result of ep-external-fn is a symbol in the package :importing-package, whereas the 'TEST symbol is defined in the :exporting-package.

Many thanks in advance,

Joris Bleys

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