In longrunning/high-availability applications, this sort of thing is necessary in order to avoid restarting and losing uptime or state. E.G. per nasa: > The R

In longrunning/high-availability applications, this sort of thing is necessary in order to avoid restarting and losing uptime or state. E.G. per nasa: > The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem (from https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html)