Changing your default base

[Moon at MIT-AI (David A. Moon)]

Note that you cannot expect to win by doing (SETQ BASE 10. IBASE 10.), because when
the machine is warm-booted it has no way to know whether the current value of those
symbols is the value you want, or some random value that they were temporarily bound
to at the time it crashed.  If you want change of base to work through warm-booting,
you must:	(ADD-INITIALIZATION "BASE" '(SETQ BASE 10. IBASE 10.) '(:NOW))
which will re-evaluate the form upon warm-boot.  I don't think there is any
trivial way to make this get un-done when you log out (but presumably most people
cold boot instead of logging out.)

Warm-booting is a last-resort mechanism and you can't expect perfect cleanliness
in its behavior, especially if you know how it works!