Re: Building Emacs overflowed pure space

[Richard Stallman]

    > It would be a little better to have a list of ten of them and pick at
    > random.  That would facilitate examining values in the Lisp debugger
    > on those occasions when you really want to.

    I don't see how.  They are uninterned, after all.

You can use symbol-value to examine an uninterned symbol.
If it uses names like `uninterned-6', and you know to find that
as (nth 6 uninterned-vars-list), you can examine it.  But this is
not something user programs are likely to do by accident.

      And "picking at
    random" means that it becomes unpredictable what loop combinations
    will happen to be debuggable, and what combinations will not.

It is not as good as if we had a feature in the debugger to do this
job 100%.  Ideal would be having a feature to examine a variable in
the debugger's selected stack frame.  However, that would be a lot of
work.  So I proposed something that would give a little bit more
debuggability in a pinch, while being very easy to do.

    It seems like a pointless exercise in obfuscation.  It does not buy us
    any encapsulation, and makes debugging and understanding the code
    harder when disassembling it.

Maybe you are right.  Lots of other internal values are exposed inside
Emacs in ways that are not quite clean; two more for dolist and
dotimes would not be much risk.

Does anyone argue against?