Re: I/O generic functions

[Sonya Keene <skeene@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: Tue, 07 Feb 89 10:13:06 PST
    From: Warren Harris <harris%hplwhh@hplabs.hp.com>

    I just wanted to point out that there is an entire section of Sonya Keene's
    book "Object Oriented Programming in Common Lisp" dedicated to an
    implementation of streams as objects.  Perhaps this implementation would be
    a good starting point for a formal proposal on generic i/o routines.  Can
    anyone summarize what might be missing in a "real" implementation?

    Warren

I'd like to recommend against this idea!   My goals in developing that
example for my book were very different from your goals in designing a
real stream implementation.    I wanted to keep the example as simple as
possible, while illustrating a lot of the sharing that can happen when
streams are done in an object-oriented way.   My main interest was not
in doing streams the right way, but just to find something that could
illustrate good modularity and inheritance.   

I agree that streams are ripe for an object-oriented design, but your
design should probably start from scratch.   Actually, there are some
object-oriented streams implementations out there (Symbolics has one,
and there must be others), and you could look into those as a starting
point.  

Sonya