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Jeremy Maitin-Shepard <jbms@attbi.com> writes:

> Given that garbage collection is used, and the high-level nature of
> emacs lisp, I that there is good reason to believe that regardless of
> any amount of effort, the password might remain somewhere in memory for
> a while.

I do believe that explicitly overwriting a string, e.g. with
`clear-string', *will* change the bits immediately.

But it's less obvious what the effect of `clrhash' is, as Simon notes.