I think the confusion started at a time when we were, for some reason, manually loading .asd files ourselves by calling (load ...), which according to my understanding is not and has never been an intended use of .asd files -- they are strictly to be considered as data files for use with supported ASDF (and Quicklisp) operators which expect to find .asd files. Although normal CL expressions are also allowed inside .asd files, the .asd files are never intended to be loaded with (load ...) by the user.
Yes. I recently modified SLIME to do the right thing when you C-c C-k a .asd file, i.e. (asdf:load-asd pathname)
Note that load-asd is an ASDF3-ism. Later ASDF2 versions only have a slightly less practical load-sysdef, and ASDF1 doesn't expose any separate abstraction for that.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Our system is defined to prevent majority politicians from overtly oppressing minorities. However, our system is also overtly defined to let majorities elect majority politicians and not let minorities wield electoral power. Kinda funny... one part of our constitution tries to fix a problem which the other half of the constitution tries to create! — Lee Salzman eihrul@tunes.org, about the US political system.