Cameron MacKinnon  <cmackin+nn@clearspot.net> wrote:
+---------------
| I once read a quotation something like "I like Lisp. It lets you feel 
| the bits between your toes."  When I first read it, I thought "huh?", 
| and I haven't had any flashes of enlightenment since.
| 
| Digging for material, I found Drew McDermott on 2003/10/20: "I think I 
| was regretting the demise of the facility in many Lisps that let you 
| coerce a fixnum to a pointer and back again (just like C!). ...
+---------------

Actually, I'll bet you'll still find such functions under the hoods
of almost all current Common Lisps' FFI facilities. For example, see
CMUCL's ALIEN:SAP-ALIEN and ALIEN:ALIEN-SAP macro/function (resp.):

    SAP-ALIEN converts SAP (a system area pointer see section 6.5)
    to an Alien value with the specified TYPE. TYPE is not evaluated.

    ALIEN-SAP returns the SAP which points to ALIEN-VALUE's data.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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