PowerLoom 3.0.2.beta and SBCL 0.8.8 Redux

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Folks,

OK, I solved the problem.

It turns out that CMU CL and SBCL share an interesting property: for 
SAFETY levels > 0, they adhere (to a considerable extent) to a 
philosophy of "declarations are assertions." That is, type declarations 
are checked. Since, by default, PowerLoom 3.0.2.beta is compiled with 
SAFETY 1, this exercised a TYPE-ERROR in LENGTH on KV-CONS: eventually 
the parameter becomes NULL, whose value is :NULL_VALUE, which is of 
course of type KEYWORD, not KV-CONS. SBCL quite rightly throws a 
TYPE-ERROR condition here, and I have to imagine that CMU CL would 
also.

The obvious solution was just to change SAFETY to 0, so I did.

Now, an interesting ramification of this is that SBCL is proving how 
successful STELLA is at being strongly typed: at SAFETY 1, LENGTH on 
KV-CONS was the only method that I encountered that threw a TYPE-ERROR. 
So another approach, besides compiling at SAFETY 0, might be to change 
KV-CONS to be even more type-safe than it already is. I recommend 
testing PowerLoom and STELLA against either CMU CL and/or SBCL in the 
future, since those compilers seem to be excellent testbeds for type 
safety issues.

In any case, thanks again for all your hard work on PowerLoom and 
STELLA. I look forward to exploring them further shortly.

Best regards,
Paul Snively
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