Re: Issue: LOAD-OBJECTS (Version 3)

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

I haven't been paying too much attention to this issue either -- I've
been trusting Moon to do the right thing on the assumption that he
knew more about it than I did.  I think his latest proposal does look
reasonable.  However, if there is disagreement about it, I might as
well suggest yet another alternative:

Have two generic functions, not one.  The first would get called by
compile-file and it would return a list of components (or whatever)
that are required to reconstruct the object.  The compiler would dump
this list of objects in its usual way.  The loader would apply the
second generic function to this list to reconstruct the object.  It
avoids the nasty syntax you object to, doesn't require functions to be
dumpable, doesn't require any special support for circular constants,
and ought to be real easy to add to the compiler/loader.  (You could
essentially convert the constant into a LOAD-TIME-VALUE expression.)

-Sandra
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