Re: COPYALL, COPYLIST, et alia

[Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW at MIT-AI>]

While this is a neat idea, it does not make it particularly easy
for you to just copy a list or a tree of conses.  I think the
goal here is to make maximally easy the things that you most often
want to do.  For much rarer things, it just isn't that hard to write
your own Lisp function.

There is a tradeoff between providing things as functions, and letting
pepole write them by themelves.  I think it is only worth providing
something and putting it in the manual if it is something likely enough
to be useful and easy enough to use that it is worth the time of the
user to remember that the function exists.  If it is too obscure or
special-purpose, he will not remember that it is around, even when he
needs it.