Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!texsun!pollux!ti-csl!m2!gateley
From: gateley@m2.csc.ti.com (John Gateley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Linking
Message-ID: <97923@ti-csl.csc.ti.com>
Date: 13 Nov 89 03:27:31 GMT
References: <5081@internal.Apple.COM> <5031@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM>
Sender: news@ti-csl.csc.ti.com
Reply-To: gateley@m2.UUCP (John Gateley)
Organization: TI Computer Science Center, Dallas
Lines: 18


In a bunch of articles, people have been mentioning the problem
with linking: read, apply, eval/compile etc. They have missed
a couple, and actually, the ones they missed are the heart of the
problem:

Intern, and symbol-function.

Intern is particularly bad, because you can intern the string
"CAR" in the lisp package, and get a symbol which has a function
definition. Intern is what makes read and all the other guys bad.

symbol-function is kind of bad. It means that you have to include
all the function definition for all symbols used as data in you program.
But, unless intern appears, all the symbols are there to be examined.

John
gateley@m2.csc.ti.com