Re: issue QUOTE-MAY-COPY, version 2

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>]

> > Rather than making an exception for gensyms, I'm inclined to believe
> > that *all* sharing of structures within an expression passed to EVAL,
> > a function passed to COMPILE, or the entire contents of a file
> > compiled with COMPILE-FILE ought to be preserved.  I don't think it
> > would be unreasonable for your first example to return NIL, but I
> > think the second one ought to return true (regardless of whether the
> > value of A is a gensym or some other kind of object).  

I don't see how that is consistent with allowing QUOTE to copy.

> > This really falls under issue CONSTANT-CIRCULAR-COMPILATION . . .

I think all of these issues are closely related, because they all
involve moving file compilation semantics into the rest of the
langauge.  My gensym example was to say that if the EQL relationships
of uninterned symbols change across file compilations, and if we adopt
the file compilation semantics for constants in general, then the EQL
realtionships of uninterned symbols can never be guaranteed (except
where they appear in code).