;;; a pain for people just learning to find their way around the code
;;; who want to use lexical search to figure out where things like
;;; EVEN-FIXNUM-LOWTAG are defined. Remove the :SUFFIXes and just expand
-;;; out the full names. Or even define them in DEF-FROB EVEN-FIXNUM-LOWTAG
+;;; out the full names. Or even define them in DEF EVEN-FIXNUM-LOWTAG
;;; style so searches like 'def.*even-fixnum-lowtag' can find them.
-;;; tags for the main low-level types, to be stored in the low three
-;;; bits to identify the type of a machine word
+;;; Tags for the main low-level types are stored in the low three
+;;; bits to identify the type of a machine word. Certain constraints
+;;; apply:
+;;; * EVEN-FIXNUM-LOWTAG and ODD-FIXNUM-LOWTAG must be 0 and 4: code
+;;; which shifts left two places to convert raw integers to tagged
+;;; fixnums is ubiquitous.
+;;; * LIST-POINTER-LOWTAG + 4 = OTHER-POINTER-LOWTAG: NIL is both a
+;;; cons and a symbol (at the same address) and depends on this.
+;;; See the definition of SYMBOL in objdef.lisp
(eval-when (:compile-toplevel :load-toplevel :execute)
;; The EVAL-WHEN is necessary (at least for Lispworks), because the
;; second DEFENUM uses the value of OTHER-IMMEDIATE-0-LOWTAG, which is