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Re: Issue: COPY-SYMBOL-PRINT-NAME
- To: David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
- Subject: Re: Issue: COPY-SYMBOL-PRINT-NAME
- From: masinter.pa@Xerox.COM
- Date: 8 Mar 89 16:13 PST
- Cc: Kent M Pitman <KMP@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>, CL-Cleanup@SAIL.Stanford.EDU
- In-reply-to: David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>'s message of Wed, 8 Mar 89 12:45 EST
Medley did this: the symbol names didn't really have a string header and
some symbol names (the "initial symbols" ) had a different place for
storing the actual characters than symbols created later. Unfortunately,
that means that SYMBOL-NAME has to CONS.
It wasn't so much a problem for Interlisp since most of the "string"
functions in Interlisp will take symbols, but in Common Lisp, it is a
performance hit. Poor design, but there's no reason to require SYMBOL-NAME
to return EQ strings.
In this case, the strings aren't EQ even though the string characters are
shared. (Think of it as strings displaced to a shared area.)