Re: issue CONSTANT-CIRCULAR-COMPILATION, version 3

[sandra%defun@cs.utah.edu (Sandra J Loosemore)]

> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 88 17:29:15 EST
> From: Dan L. Pierson <pierson@mist.encore.com>
> 
> Once again it's
> supporting possibly broken current practice versus maintaining the
> traditional flexibility of Lisp.

This seems like a self contradiction -- obviously those
implementations whose current practice is "broken" don't have a
tradition of being flexible.  (They have have a tradition of being
"broken", I guess.) :-)

All this talk about "tradition" depends on which "tradition" you're
most familiar with.  Here at Utah we have the Portable Lisp Compiler
that goes back to around 1979ish, and it has always refused to handle
circular constants.  Likewise the idea of coalescing isomorphic
constants has a long history in the MacLisp dialect.  Historically,
most Lisp dialects have had some differences in semantics between
compiled and interpreted code.  From my perspective, for example, it
seems to be traditional to leave constants alone in interpreted code,
but to allow both COMPILE and COMPILE-FILE to copy and coalesce and
barf on circularities. 

-Sandra
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