RE: Proposal 13

[SCOTT <SAFIER%cgi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>]

I beleive that proposal 13 is a good one.  A user of common lisp should
be warned that an implemenation of &rest might share structure with
some other list, or that &rest arguments may not be "freshly consed".

However, some implementations of common lisp which cons &rest arguments
from the stack have also imposed a limit on the number of values which
&rest can take.  The upper limit for the particular implementation in
question seems to be 212 values.  If any more than 212 values are passed
as an &rest argument, some internal stack overflows.

This implementation restriction makes it extremely difficult to write
portable code (and possibly impossible to code the particular task
that we are currently working on).  

Although common lisp implementations should be allowed to cons &rest
arguments from the stack, they should not be allowed to impose a limit
on the number of values which can be passed to an &rest.

-Scott Safier
Carnegie Group Inc
(SAFIER@CGI.CSNET)