Issue: TYPE-OF-UNDERCONSTRAINED (Version 1)

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

Incidentally, I would really like to see TYPE-OF constrained to return a 
portable type-specifier for all the standard types.  This would mean that
(TYPE-OF 112312) should not return SI:MEDIUM-SIZE-FIXNUM, but rather some
thing like (SIGNED-BYTE 17) [if that's what SI:MEDIUM-SIZE-FIXNUM means.]
Sure, it could return simply INTEGER; but by returning (SIGNED-BYTE 17),
it gives an implementation-dependent cue,  in a portable way, that
SI:MEDIUM-SIZE-FIXNUM is meant.

However, that's probably too much to ask for at this stage of the game.
Further, I must also confess that Lucid's implementation returns some
non-portable, internal things like:

  (type-of (make-array 5 :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))) 
     ==> SYSTEM:SIMPLE-8BIT-VECTOR

Instead, I would want it to return (SIMPLE-ARRAY (UNSIGNED-BYTE 8) 1) --
the equivalent type-specifier from CLtL.  [About 9 months ago, I started 
to rectify this; but it's a very low priority item, and hasn't made it to 
"prime time" yet.]


-- JonL --