Re: &REST

[edsel!bhopal!jonl@navajo.stanford.edu (Jon L White)]

For compatibility with the semantics of CLtL, Lucid chose to make the
&rest arg be a true (heap-consed) list.

But the kinds of folks who have tolerated the bug which Dan Wienreb so
gloriously announced are not entirely stupid.  There is a market, at
least amongst some systems programmers who use lisp, to get the kind of
"last-bit tweaking" performance that a stack-allocated &rest list would
afford.  Lucid's product will shortly be giving the user access to some
of the underlying primitives which permit dynamic-extent consing (the
3600's "stack list" consing is one such example).

The default for &REST lists will, of course, still be lists of indefinite 
extent.

-- JonL --