re: Profiling queries

[hall@allegra.att.com (Bob Hall)]

Seemingly, a lot of questions asked recently about profiling code in MCL,
such as

    [...]
    What I'd like is either 
    [...]
    2) A function that can be called to return the number of conses used or
    [...]

or

    How can I find out how much time is spent in gc? [paraphrase]

can all be answered by the same meta-response: try macroexpanding a call to
the TIME macro such as (TIME NIL) to see how they do it.  This tells all kinds
of stuff like how to find out how many conses have been allocated, how many
ticks are spent in gc, etc.  Admittedly, this info is nonportable (maybe even
across different patches), but it's probably about as well as one can do.

-- Bob