Re: cells

[Barak.Pearlmutter@F.GP.CS.CMU.EDU]

	From: Barak Pearlmutter

		They [locatives] do let vectors and structures
        (including environments) get gc'ed when all that's left is a
        pointer to something in their innards, which is nice,

    From: Paul Robertson

    It is?

This issue is like to the question of whether to do "tail recursion
optimization."  As in that case, it seems to me that the burden of proof
is on you, since ceteris paribus it is better that garbage be reclaimed.

In response to the "debugging ease" argument which the above analogy
suggests you will use, it is simple enough to arrange things so that one
can get to the object containing the cell a locative points to if the
object has not been deallocated, thus complicating debugging only when
the containing object has actually been freed.

Do you have some coherent argument in mind, or are you just loyal to the
current Symbolics technology?

							--Barak.