[no subject]

[RMS@MIT-AI]

I am surprised to hear an objection to making IO streams
use message passing because they already do.  They just do
it in an inefficient and kludgy way which requires special
case crocks such as the stream default handler to do things
which are natural when classes are in use.
It is bad for the system to have two similar but incompatible
sorts of message passing protocols, because that it just means
that the user has to remember that you send a message to a window
one way and send a message to a stream another way.  Since the
stream way is clearly inferior, it ought to be flushed.

What this amounts to is
1) Making people call streams with <- instead of funcall, and
2) making streams be instances of classes.
But 2 does not have to be done instantly.  All that really needs
to be done is to change the existing streams from being of
DTP-CLOSURE to DTP-ENTITY, and they will continue to work
while being gradually replaced by real instances of classes.

Only the <- function, ENTITYP, and something to create an ENTITY
have to be in the cold load.