Twenex Maclisp wish list

[Jonathan A. Rees <JAR at MIT-MC>]

1. Does FASLOAD or anyone else do anything about the OF%PLN bit in
their various OPENF's?  Evidently file I/O goes incredibly faster if the
monitor doesn't need to continually be checking the line-number-p
bit in file words.  Perhaps for ascii files there could be an SSTATUS option
settable on systems where you KNOW that you're never going to encounter
a line number you'll want to ignore.

2. Is there any chance that Maclisp could hack the TOPS-20 argument block
if it's given one?  The idea is, you get this 128-word chunk of crap
with the PRARG jsys; the first word is usually zero, and if it is, the
rest of the words are an ASCIZ string which should be fetchable from lisp
with STATUS JCL.  This convention is used quite a bit at Yale and perhaps
elsewhere, especially places using Yale tools, which are spreading.
(This is the "correct" way of doing things, compared to what the
DEC EXEC does with the "rescan buffer" nonsense.  Actually the text
in the PRARG, I think like the rescan buffer, gets you the entire
command line, not just the JCL.)

3. Does Maclisp do a SETSN on startup (set system name)?  If it did a
SETSN to "MACLISP," programs which cared (like statistics gatherers:
"how much time is being spent by Maclisps?") would be much happier.