Re: LOAD-TIME-EVAL

[David N Gray <Gray@DSG.csc.ti.com>]

> Anyone who asks that #, be flushed is, in effect, asking me to write this kind
> of stuff. 

Kent,
Wait a minute; I was _not_ advocating flushing #, ; I _was_ saying that the
READ-ONLY-P argument was not a good idea.  What I was objecting to was the
notion of evaluating a "constant" at load time and then destructively modifying
that value later; I don't see that any of your examples do that.  In the rare
cases where there is a valid need to do something like that, the approach
shown by Dalton seems sufficient.

>    ...  Displacing macros were once the rage,
> but they have become less of a big deal over time as people have shifted
> to less user-intrusive paradigms (single pass semantic analysis by
> compilers, once-only interpreter pre-pass, and/or hashed memoization --
> none of which involve displacing user code).

I'm obviously biased since I use an implementation that still uses displacing
macros.  I haven't noticed anywhere that CLtL outlaws this, so I didn't see
why the standard should explicitly outlaw that approach for just this one
feature.

  -- David Gray