[Robert S. Boyer <boyer@CLI.COM>: Fast IO]

[Bill Schelter <wfs@CLI.COM>]

I had originally felt it might be a good idea to have a specialized
type of stream for faster io in common lisp, but now am in accord with
Moon that this is simply not necessary.

Just before receiving his message I had finished reworking the
write-byte/write-char and read-byte/read-char WITHOUT declarations, so
they are now in the 2 to 3 microsecond range respectively, in
AKCL(version 1.116) on a sun3/280.  The difference between this and
what I could do with a specialized stream was practically not possible
to time, when reading or writing a million characters.  Of course
streams other than file streams and interprocess streams are still
substantially slower, but that is probably reasonable (for the
moment..).

Bill Schelter