Mmh. Like I said, I'm not familiar with LispWorks, so take this with a grain of salt, but to me it looks like the system is just retrieving the original source expression that it keeps around in addition to the executable representation. But this is ultimately a question of implementation. My original point was that in Picolisp runtime-constructed lists are directly executable, without any processing. An unroller function that takes an action `foo` and a runtime number, e.g. 3, would return `'(() (foo) (foo) (foo))` and that would be it. In other Lisps you would first build the equivalent of this list and then pass it to `eval` to make it actually executable. Whether this step is expensive or not depends on the system. E.g. efficient closures require scanning the containing scopes and creating minimal state objects. Just storing the parent environment pointer would be super-inefficient and would prevent the entire environment from being garbage-collected, hence my claim that dynamic scope is the only thing that really makes sense in a direct-interpreted lisp, and that the presence of lexical scope implies some nontrivial processing before execution, though not necessarily as extensive as what would usually be called compilation.

Edit: lexical analysis -> lexical scope

But the behavior changed accordingly when lispm mutated the source expression.

So if there is another form that is actually being used for the execution, the change in source must have been detected and propagated to that other form.

Anyway, that situation looks like true blue interpreted functions. There is nested list source you can tweak, and the tweaks somehow go into effect.

    CL-USER 100 > (defun unroll (n exp) `(lambda () ,(loop repeat n collect exp)))
    UNROLL

    CL-USER 101 > (unroll 3 '(foo))
    (LAMBDA NIL ((FOO) (FOO) (FOO)))

    CL-USER 102 > (eval *)
    #<anonymous interpreted function 8020000EC9>

    CL-USER 103 > (describe *)

    #<anonymous interpreted function 8020000EC9> is a TYPE::INTERPRETED-FUNCTION
    CODE      (LAMBDA NIL ((FOO) (FOO) (FOO)))

As you can see, the thing is basically the same as a cons cell with two entries the type and the code:

    (TYPE::INTERPRETED-FUNCTION . (LAMBDA NIL ((FOO) (FOO) (FOO))))

The above Lisp implementation does not use a cons cell, but a different type mechanism to easily and reliably identify the runtime type.

I picolisp this is hardwired into the interpreter. The interpreter will also need to check every time at runtime, if the list structure is actually a function and what kind of function it is.

In above Lisp, the type of the function is encoded during EVAL and the check for the type is then a type tag check.

for this example here, using the LispWorks implementation, it also makes no difference for EVAL if it is a function with 10 or with 100000 subforms. The execution time is small. No special processing of the list of subforms takes place. For example the code is not compiled, not converted to byte code, not converted to another representation.

    CL-USER 111 > (let ((f (unroll 10 '(foo)))) (time (eval f)))
    Timing the evaluation of (EVAL F)

    User time    =        0.000
    System time  =        0.000
    Elapsed time =        0.000
    Allocation   = 184 bytes
    0 Page faults
    GC time      =        0.000
    #<anonymous interpreted function 8020001DA9>

    CL-USER 112 > (let ((f (unroll 100000 '(foo)))) (time (eval f)))
    Timing the evaluation of (EVAL F)

    User time    =        0.000
    System time  =        0.000
    Elapsed time =        0.000
    Allocation   = 184 bytes
    0 Page faults
    GC time      =        0.000
    #<anonymous interpreted function 8020000839>

    CL-USER 113 > (defun unroll (n exp) `(lambda () ,(loop repeat n collect exp)))
    UNROLL

I stand corrected, thank you :)

I always thought that `eval` in CL was an un-idiomatic and fairly expensive operation, even for code that is not compiled. You learn something every day...

A Common Lisp implementation may implement EVAL by calling the compiler. That would be more expensive. Several Common Lisp implementation use EVAL to create an interpreted function and then the user can call COMPILE to compile these.