Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!phri!marob!cowan
From: cowan@marob.MASA.COM (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: #( syntax
Message-ID: <652@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 12 May 89 18:16:30 GMT
References: <8905120152.AA17406@anaconda.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Organization: ESCC  New York City
Lines: 19

In article <8905120152.AA17406@anaconda.Stanford.EDU> rit@ANACONDA.STANFORD.EDU (Jean-Francois Rit) writes:
>
>I came on a strange, to me, feature of coral common lisp 1.2.1:
>the following expression (setq toto #(1 2 3)) makes lisp return an error
>(cannot eval). However (setq toto '#(1 2 3)) works, and toto is actually the
>right vector object.
>Both formulation work in lucid.
>So what's happening, is the coral implementation wrong? Is it reasonable to
>consider the quoted version a common denominator?

Both systems are correct.  The Common Lisp standard does not require
general vectors to be self-quoting (numbers, characters, strings, and
bit-vectors only).  However, any given implementation is allowed to define
semantics for extending evaluation to forms other than symbols, lists,
and self-quoting objects.  Lucid evidently defines general vectors as
self-quoting (valid extension), whereas Coral barfs on evaluation of 
general vectors.

To be safe and portable, always quote general vectors explicitly.