Issue: CONSTANT-SIDE-EFFECTS (no proposal)

[Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>]

re: My notes from Fairfax meeting...

I remember remarking at the committee meeting that Jim Miller of the
Scheme community thought an important aspect of the "constants" problem
was to make "read-only-ness" a first class concept -- that being the only
way to distinguish the objects stored by a defparameter and those stored
by a defconstant [many, if not most, implementors concerned with this
issue have some phase wherein "constants" are put into a write-protected
memory.]   It wouldn't take much to add a couple functions like:

 CONSTANT-STORAGE-P -- tells whether an object is stored in "constants area",
                       which is considered "read-only"; it may or may not
                       actually be write-protected.
 CONSTANT-COPY      -- copies a random object into the "constants area" memory

But of course, since there isn't even a function COPY in CL, there will
be lots of discussion on this matter.


-- JonL --