defvar

[Daniel Brotsky <dcb at MIT-AI>]

In System 78.57, ZMail 38.5, Experimental Tester 20.0, Reasoning Utility Package 1.1, Experimental Plan Calculus 1.2, microcode 848, 60.45 Hz, on Lisp Machine Four:

Doing Evaluate Defun [Control-Top-E] (or Compile Defun [Control-Greek-E], same
result both times) of

(defvar foo 3)

with foo set to 0 resulted in a value of 3 and foo being set to 3.

This disagreed with doing the same thing in a breakpoint Zmacs, which returned
nil and left foo set to 0.

This error did not occur with Compile Buffer, nor when the QFASL was loaded
after a Compile File of the buffer. (The source lives in DCB;DEFTST and the
qfasl in DCB;DEFTST QFASL).


P.S. JerryB also had this problem while running System 78.57 on cadr9.