Daniel Weinreb  <dlw@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| Camm Maguire wrote:
| > As many know, many standard lisp functions require &rest arguments,
| > which are quite slow in a system like GCL which passes arguments on a
| > C stack.  ...  So I'm trying to live with the &rest, but allow
| > the compiler to eliminate the call to list if the &rest variable
| > is only accessed passively, i.e. via car and the like.
...
| Yeah, it's hard.  In the Lisp machine, for a long time, if you
| took a list that was the value of an &rest argument and tried
| to use it longer than the lifetime of the function, it just
| didn't work and you were in real trouble.  I think this was
| fixed later but it's hard to remember whether, let alone how,
| it was done.
+---------------

AFAICT, CLHS allows holding onto a &REST parameter's value after
the callee's return... BUT, that might be dangerous anyway due
to the following:

    http://alu.org/HyperSpec/Body/sec_3-4-1-3.html
    3.4.1.3 A specifier for a rest parameter
    ...
    The value of a rest parameter is permitted, but not required,
    to share structure with the last argument to APPLY.

and:

    http://alu.org/HyperSpec/Body/fun_apply.html
    Function APPLY
    ...
    When the function receives its arguments via &REST, it is
    permissible (but not required) for the implementation to bind
    the rest parameter to an object that shares structure with the
    last argument to APPLY. Because a function can neither detect
    whether it was called via APPLY nor whether (if so) the last
    argument to APPLY was a constant, conforming programs must
    neither rely on the list structure of a rest list to be freshly
    consed, nor modify that list structure.

So one must still be careful with it.


-Rob

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