Re: Issue: ADJUST-ARRAY-NOT-ADJUSTABLE (Version 3)

[Dan L. Pierson <pierson@mist.encore.com>]

    I thought I made my opposition clear enough -- that the Symbolics "status 
    quo" is not the status quo for the community at large; their "extension" 
    is not one that is fully compatible with (the obvious reading of) CLtL.
    In particular, the part that of the proposal that suggests that 
            (make-arry n :adjustable nil)
    can legitimately return an adjustable array flies in the face of the
    very reason reason why the type SIMPLE-ARRAY was introduced into Common
    Lisp in the first place!  Listen very carefully to those implementing
    Lisp on stock hardware -- ask if they think it is perfectly fine to
    **** have no way whatsoever *** to guarantee getting a
    non-adjustable array. 
    
While I agree with you here, I would like to point out that the
position you are taking here strikes me as being the opposite of your
position on REQUIRE-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS.  In both cases, the status quo
allows careful programmers to write portable code as in:

    - Never adjust a "non-adjustable" array
    - Never use REQUIRE in a context that would cause file loading

The, quite legitimate, objection to the status quo is that it makes it
_very_ likely that programmers, being human and fallible, will
accidently wind up producing non-portable code because the current
versions of these features lack adaquate (read any) portable error
checking.