re: Issue: ADJUST-ARRAY-NOT-ADJUSTABLE (version 10)

[Dick Gabriel <RPG@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>]

[In reply to message from KMP@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM sent Tue, 20 Jun 89 22:44 EDT.]

KMP writes:

   Sometimes you cannot call ADJUST-ARRAY because
   you don't own all the pointers and cannot do the magic SETQ and some
   applications may need to be able to detect this dynamically, perhaps
   going into the debugger in that case, but at least having the option to
   know.

Seems like the smart applications writer is going to write

(make-array...:adjustable t ...)

rather than go into the debugger or something failure-like. This should
serve him well, especially if all implementations he uses implements
:ADJUST-ARRAY T by making an adjustable-array.

ADJUSTABLE-ARRAY-P is an acceptable name because it is testing whether the
array is adjustable, not whether you can invoke ADJUST-ARRAY on it.  Maybe
this is the first time it had the right name. ADJUST-ARRAY, on the other
hand, might be better with a different name. Deciding that better name
is as hard as deciding what the right name for ADJUSTABLE-ARRAY-P should
have been (ABLE-TO-INVOKE-ADJUST-ARRAY-ON-P?).

			-rpg-