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    Date: Thu, 19 Jun 86 03:00 EDT
    From: Kent M Pitman <KMP@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>

    ... reminds me, though. I wouldn't mind it if CL offered COPY-STRING
    and maybe even COPY-CONS -- again for the sake of perspicuity.

I believe that the intention was that COPY-SEQ was sufficiently
perspicuous for copying strings.  I presume it was assumed that
COPY-LIST and COPY-TREE were what people needed the most often, and
COPY-CONS wasn't something that would be needed so often to justify
specific inclusion of such a function given that it's easy to write
yourself.  (A lot of value judgements, about which things would be
sufficiently useful to so many people that having it pre-included in the
language, had to be made during the design of the language; naturally
there's no single right answer in any particular case.)