On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 3:21 PM, Alan Ruttenberg alanruttenberg@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Erik Huelsmann ehuels@gmail.com wrote:
Since packages can be deleted, symbols be garbage collected. In the current implementation, GC-ing a special symbol will leave the slot it was assigned unused. There's no way the slot gets reassigned, because nothing keeps track of these 'dead' slots. To make matters worse: there may be huge lisp structures referenced in the dead slot, because it's also not cleared out.
Would it not make sense to have delete-package at least clear out the relevant values in the array.
No, because symbols are first-class objects, so a given symbol can continue to be referenced even after its home package has been deleted.
Bye, Alessio