GNU bug report logs - #40671
[DOC] modify literal objects

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From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2 <at> gmail.com>
Cc: ke.vigouroux <at> laposte.net, 40671 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen <at> web.de>, Mattias Engdegård <mattiase <at> acm.org>, Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru>, Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
Subject: bug#40671: [DOC] modify literal objects
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2020 13:14:36 -0700

On 4/26/20 12:22 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:

> nobody "accidentally" writes code like this.

Not code like my trivial example, no. But the underlying problem is all too
common. After all, it's why Emacs is dumping core here - the Emacs Lisp
interpreter is using C code like that to implement some Lisp strings.

> We could either (a) remove the notion of
> "constant" objects so that all objects become mutable, (b) introduce
> static type checking including const-correctness so that attempting to
> mutate a "constant" object would fail byte-compilation, and/or (c)
> make it an error to mutate such objects at runtime (similar to (set t
> nil)).

Neither (a) nor (b) sound very practical. Emacs formerly did a better job at (c)
and could do so again, so it's an obvious way to move forward here.

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