[no subject]

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

As I understand Dave's message, he is suggesting a storage copier that
can do any of several things; it would have so many options that it
would be approrpiate to use keyword arguments.  Presumably such a thing
is primarily useful for people who understand about such internal hairy
issues as areas and the internal representations of objects (i.e.
cdr-coding).  This is a function for experts; it can validly be rather
complex, with options and modes relating to all sorts of internal
things.  I think it would suffice to have some functions for basic
users that do things sensible merely in terms of Lisp objects, such as
copylist, copytree and copyalist, and then just use this one moby
function for al iry internal-systm uses.  copylist* is somewhere in
between these, since it doesn't make too much sense if you don't grok
cdr-coding.  I am not sure whether it deserves to exist with a short
name like that.  Certainly the moby function should subsume all the
others.

More votes have come in for plain-old COPYTREE.  If there are no objections
I will install this in the Lisp Machine.