Re: [spr944] structures in fasl files

[cox@Franz.COM (Charles A. Cox)]

First, we apologize for the delay in answering this.  Two of the major
machines Franz uses for electronic mail (uunet.uu.net and
ucbvax.berkeley.edu) were having problems last week and our email flow
was disrupted.  If you tried sending mail to Franz last week and
haven't heard a response (or got a bounceback), please try sending
again.

Regarding your questions about COMPILER::*FASL-CIRCLE*, this is a flag
which, as you discovered, determines whether the compiler should
preserve EQLness of structures within fasl files.  In general, it
works just fine.  However, this option was never exported (and thus
not documented), because in order to make it handle general cases
where people are doing funny things with packages, a few more things
needed to be worked out before this symbol could be advertised.
Because of its unsupported and undocumented status, *FASL-CIRCLE* is
not required to be in Allegro CL, and is in fact missing in some
versions.

X3J13, the committee chartered to draft the specification for ANSI
Common Lisp, has approved a proposal which requires Common Lisp
compilers to preserve EQLness of substructures within a file compiled
with COMPILE-FILE (Proposal CONSTANT-CIRCULAR-COMPILATION).  As part
of Franz' ongoing process to make Allegro CL ANSI compliant, you
should be able to looking forward to this feature in future releases.

	Charley
---
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