Visible Hash-Tables

[Jon L White <edsel!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu>]

re: . . . Also, there are no accessors
    at all for some other types, such as RANDOM-STATE and HASH-TABLE (and
    this is the one that prompted this discussion).

Guy Steele's "Clarifications" of December 6, 1985 added the necessary,
missing accessors for hash-tables: HASH-TABLE-TEST, HASH-TABLE-SIZE, 
HASH-TABLE-REHASH-SIZE, and HASH-TABLE-REHASH-THRESHOLD.  Lucid's 
implementation added them almost immediately, although documentation 
about their existence is somewhat recent.

These "Clarifications" were presented at the meeting which founded X3J13 -- 
for ANSI standardization of Common Lisp -- and represented a consensus 
amongst the community back then.  There was some subsequent discussion of 
the points on this mailing list shortly after that meeting.

One unfortunate lacuna in the x3j13 "cleanup" committee's work is that there
is no explicit statement about the validity of Steele's "Clarifications".  
In fact, most of the individual "Clarifications" haven't been specifically 
and individually addressed.


-- JonL --