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Re: byte specifiers
- To: Guy.Steele at CMU-10A
- Subject: Re: byte specifiers
- From: JonL at PARC-MAXC
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1982 20:42:00 -0000
- Cc: Earl A. Killian <EAK at MIT-MC>, common-lisp at SU-AI
- In-reply-to: Guy.Steele's message of 23 August 1982 2328-EDT (Monday)
True, an integral "byte specifier" is useful, but last fall CommonLisp had
in it the very useful functions LOAD-BYTE and DEPOSIT-BYTE, which
took separate arguments for the "pp" and "ss" parts.
These two functions seem to have disappeared from the current CommonLisp
manual, without any discussion. What happened? I tried to bring this
matter up at Pgh last week, but it seems to have gotten lost in the wash.
Anyway, the value of separating them (if EAK's arguments weren't enough)
is that frequently the "ss" part is constant, but the "pp" part varying. Just
for the record, the VAX has instructions which are like LOAD-BYTE, rather
than the PDP10ish LDB.