[slime-devel] simple-base-string declarations

[Christophe Rhodes]

Hi,

In a number of places in swank.lisp various strings are declared as
SIMPLE-BASE-STRING.  Is there a reason for this declaration -- in
particular, is it expected that these strings will be specialized to
hold only BASE-CHAR?  Or are they in fact general strings?  (at least
the version in BRIEFLY-DESCRIBE-SYMBOL-FOR-EMACS leads me to suspect
that they are fairly general strings).

If I'm right, could the declaration be changed to reflect this, maybe
to SIMPLE-STRING (or even STRING, if they're not in
performance-critical areas)?  It is likely that sbcl, in the near
future, will have multiple string representations, where
SIMPLE-BASE-STRING means (SIMPLE-ARRAY BASE-CHAR (*)), which will be
distinct from (SIMPLE-ARRAY CHARACTER (*)) [ they're currently the
same in all known implementations, I believe].

Cheers,

Christophe
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(set-pprint-dispatch 'number (lambda (s o) (declare (special b)) (format s b)))
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