3:03:25beachBike: Thanks! There was a time when the FASL was meant to contain only native instructions, so we had to deconstruct every literal. Now that the FASL contains a printed version of the AST, if the reader can read a literal in the FASL, there is no need to deconstruct it.
3:04:56beachAnd there was a time when literals had to be created by the top-level function resulting from the compilation of a FASL, and then transmitted as shared lexical variables to inner functions. Now, the literal is an immediate value in native code.
3:10:08beachThis new solution means we have the same advantage as a Common Lisp implementation that goes to great length to define NIL as a fixed address, except we have that advantage for every literal.