Re: issue CONSTANT-CIRCULAR-COMPILATION, version 4

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

> unless more than one weirded-out user falls upon it as follows:
>   (1) It is a natural case of some money-earning software product, and
>       not just another exercise to show how bad someone's compiler is;
>   (2) The time saved by a special-case switch to turn off the tabling
>       algorithms can be translated into a real dollars-and-cents profit

One of the pragmatist philosophers (James?  Dewey?) used to talk about
the "cash value" of things -- i.e., what difference did it make.  It's
reasonable to think that way.  But it's not so reasonable to insist that
the only thing that matters is "money-earning software".  I do not think
that commercial considerations full stop should decide any issue.

That said, however:

> re: I think any serious implementation of COMPILE-FILE will quietly handle
>     circular data, just as any serious garbage collector is expected to.
> 
> Well-said, Jim!

Exactly.

But for me the deciding factor is that I can write circular constants
in source code.  I don't like the idea of a language that can't compile
its own source notation.  (#. is a pain, but I'm willing to keep it).