[no subject]

[JLK@MIT-MC]

We had this problem on MC yesterday where a somewhat inexperienced LISPM user
(KLM) wrote some code which opened a file on MC for reading and did interleaved
reading and computing.  While she was debugging, she managed to get about 30
channels going at once which resulted in all of MC's disk channels getting tied
up and MC ground to a halt.  I have since explained to her about UNWIND-PROTECT
but it seems that it is rather a gross loss that this could happen at all.  It
occurred to me that since you almost always want to have a file open for a
limited scope, the preferred primitive should be something like KMP's IOTA or
FILE-BIND or some such (is there such a thing in the LISPM?).  While flushing
OPEN completely would be too radical a step, I would suggest the manual should
be written to encourage file-binding as the normal way of hacking files.