directory streams

[Mike McMahon <MMCM at MIT-AI>]

    Date: 26 December 1981 23:43-EST
    From: Richard M. Stallman <RMS at MIT-AI>
    I've changed the handling of unrecognized properties in directory
    streams to be to read them, not to take them as strings.
    This is more general.
On the contrary, strings are more general.  They make no incorrect syntactic
assumptions.  READ will be confused by /'s, :'s and spaces in dates; by spaces and
commas in textual lists; by unbalanced parens or double-quotes; stray #'s, etc.
If you use strings, then M-X Change File Properties always works, you just lose
the local error checking and canonicalization.  With READ, in addition to getting
errors you can lose potentially significant case (in filenames and user names).

    If SETTABLE-FILE-PROPERTIES is given as "T", it now means
    the symbol T rather than the list with one element (T).
Wouldn't it be more consistent to have SETTABLE-PROPERTIES<NL> turn into
(:SETTABLE-PROPERTIES T) rather than having to translate (:SETTABLE-PROPERTIES (T))?