Re: issue COMPILED-FUNCTION-REQUIREMENTS

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

> Date: Sat, 7 Jan 89  16:44:27 CST
> From: David N Gray <Gray@DSG.csc.ti.com>
> 
> We make good use of the type COMPILED-FUNCTION in our implementation,
> but all of the accessor functions for objects of that type are
> non-standard, which makes me wonder if it might be best to just remove
> this type from the standard along with BIGNUM.

That's also a possibility.  One of the other things I was thinking about
was putting the various constraints on COMPILE and COMPILE-FILE instead
of the COMPILED-FUNCTION type.  I could write this up as an alternate
proposal.

I also made good use of the COMPILED-FUNCTION type internally in
A-Lisp, but much of the need for it goes away with the introduction of
the FUNCTION-TYPE proposal.  COMPILED-FUNCTION was used mostly to
distinguish "true" functions from symbols and lambda lists, so if you
declared something to be a COMPILED-FUNCTION, the compiler could use a
very efficient opencoding for funcalls.

Are there any implementations that use distinguished representations
for COMPILED-FUNCTIONs that use type declarations in this way?  If so,
that might be an argument for retaining the type specifier (to make
the usage portable). 

-Sandra
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