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bug#40671: [DOC] modify literal objects


From: Dmitry Gutov
Subject: bug#40671: [DOC] modify literal objects
Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 03:26:59 +0300
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.7.0

Thanks, Michael,

+1 on your points, but this one especially:

On 11.05.2020 03:00, Michael Heerdegen wrote:

+  A mutable object stops being mutable if it is part of an expression
+that is evaluated.  For example:

FWIW, I would feel better about the word "mutable" if you would
introduce the term like "safely mutable", and then say that we call it
just "mutable" in the following sections because this is shorter.  Drew
mentioned his dislike for the term "safe" AFAIR but I think "my Emacs
won't crash if I follow this" vs. "it can crash" describes some kind of
safety.

"safely mutable" definitely sounds better to me. And while we might use the shorthand "mutable" in the corresponding section, while referring to this notion outside of it, it would be better to use the full two-word version.

+  When the same value appears multiple times in a program, the Lisp
+interpreter might save time or space by reusing existing values or
+their components.  For example, @code{(eq "abc" "abc")} returns

I think we call "values" what evaluation of expressions yields, so
values don't appear in a program (to be read).  I don't know the
backgrounds and when this can happen.  Is it always the interpreter that
does this mapping?

"Same syntax" is not good as well:

    (eq (list 1 2 3) (list 1 2 3))

doesn't provoke the pitfall you warn about, but your wording doesn't
make clear why the one case is ok and the other is not.  Maybe it's
again as simple as saying something about objects as being part of a
program?

FWIW, CLtL seems to use a clunky term "similar as constants" for this.





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