[no subject]

[Richard M. Stallman <RMS at MIT-AI>]

    Date: 28 December 1981 16:17-EST
    From: Mike McMahon <MMcM at MIT-AI>

    The current (in the source) changes for :DIRECTORY-LIST-STREAM will not
    work (with QFILE in particular).

    First, there is no way for the :DIRECTORY-STREAM message to refuse to do
    the sorting remotely.  I assume the right behaviour is for the :SORTED
    keyword to be passed on to this message and it can get an error.  This
    error must then cause DIRECTORY-INPUT-STREAM-IO to use the slower local
    sorting method.

It was ok to leave this for later because I knew that the only use of
:DIRECTORY-LIST-STREAM does not use the :SORTED keyword (have you
added any uses?).  To do local sorting, :DIRECTORY-LIST-STREAM can
call :DIRECTORY-LIST passing on the :SORTED flag, then cons a closure
to hand out the elements of the directory list one by one.
QFILE used to assume that sorting had to be local; if you want to keep
doing so, just redefine :DIRECTORY-LIST-STREAM to do that whenever the
:SORTED flag is passed.

:DIRECTORY-LIST-STREAM accomplishes anything only if there is no local
sorting.