Re: [Masinter.pa: Re: questions]

[Skona Brittain <skona%csilvax@hub.ucsb.edu>]

This is a response to the first part of the first of Kathy's questions:

My impression is that the return value of close is at most nil, rather than 
the stream.  Actually I've assumed that it returns no values, since none were 
mentioned and none were that useful.  

This impression seems to be shared by at least some other authors.  I've 
checked a few implementations (KCL retuns t) and several textbooks (most don't 
mention it, apparently deliberately, but Wilensky says he's assuming it returns 
nil and Brooks' example indicates that no value is returned).

On the other hand, perhaps the lack of a return value in CLtL is just a printing
error.  (After all, I didn't assume that make-array returns no values!).  Is it
perhaps the case that all of the built-in functions have at least 1 return 
value?

Skona