no :in-file

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: Wed, 19 Apr 89 15:53:40 PDT
    From: Eric Benson <eb@lucid.com>

    However, in order to be competitive with C in speed it would be useful
    to be able to do the following:

    For binary streams, declare the element-type of the stream, e.g. allow
    the STREAM type specifier to take an optional element-type like ARRAY
    and COMPLEX.

I see no harm in this, if someone wants to propose it.  I'm not sure
whether Symbolics would use it, but I think it's a reasonable thing
for imaginable implementations to want.

    For binary streams, functions to read and write arrays in a single
    chunk.  Lucid supplies READ-ARRAY and WRITE-ARRAY as extensions.

    For character input, a destructive version of READ-LINE.

Symbolics Genera has the equivalent of all of these under different
names.  The read-array and write-array (shouldn't they be called
read-vector and write-vector?) are generic and work for character
streams as well, given a string as the vector.  Someone should write
a proposal for these features.  It might or might not be too late
to add this to X3J13 Common Lisp, but at least everybody could use
compatible names for their extensions.