Marcus Harnisch writes:
It should perhaps be made clearer in this and similar docstrings
that
the side effect modification really means that PLIST might have
changed in unforseeable ways after the operation and that it does not
replace proper assignment.
In Lisp, "change by side effect" always means "this is an optimization
that reuses existing conses, and potentially has unexpected
consequences if you have variables that contain subobjects of this
object." Variables containing a list structure must always be
refreshed by set'ting them after such operations.
There are a couple score such functions in XEmacs proper, and probably
as many more in cl.el and friends. I don't think such basic
information should be repeated so many times in the docstrings,
although perhaps there should be a manual node on it. (I'm happy to
listen to arguments otherwise, but that's how I think about it now.)
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