Re: pi seems not to be a constant

 > Yes, now it is a sound proposal. But, if implemented in plain Clisp it
 > would make variable precision floats a PITA to use, in addition to

I don't see how it makes variable precision any worse than before.

 > invalidating all previously written Clisp programs using variable
 > precision floats.

Actually, only those using variable precision float CONSTANTS,
and I'm not so sure that all those would be invalidated.  Some 
might actually be fixed, if their authors didn't have in mind 
that those values should change.

However, I agree that it would (or at least could) be necessary to
change various occurrences of pi to (pi) and similarly for the other
constants.  I wonder how many such things would have to be changed.
I bet not many.
What's the view of the clisp authors/community on the relative value
of backward compatibility compared to conformance and other
priorities?  I've occasionally found that code that worked in an
earlier version stopped working in a later one.  
But I doubt I could enumerate those cases.

 > One solution could be for the ansi mode to transform all these
 > variables in constant variables, and remove the EXT:LONG-FLOAT-DIGITS
 > function from the image.

I don't see that removing EXT:LONG-FLOAT-DIGITS is really necessary.
It's an extension, and if you don't use it then everything seems to
conform.  As long as we interpret "best long float approximation" to
mean best without using the extension.

 > Still, I don't get the need to do this work, supposing someone is
 > willing to do it (It seems I haven't got all the emails in this thread
 > and I may have missed some clarifying explanation of this point)

I don't claim it's necessary, only an improvement.  A small one, but
also, I think, requiring a small amount of work. 

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