File IO info

[co19c461@serc.3m.com (Paul L. Krueger)]

I have written routines to read and show picts from pict files.  These
work correctly but are quite slow for some kinds of picts (although they
seem pretty reasonable for others).  The reason is that I need to read
the pict file as a binary file and CL only has read-byte defined.
Consequently I have to create a loop to read each byte and put it into
the buffer specified by the draw-pict routine.  It would be nice to have
something like FSRead where I could just specify how many bytes to read
and where to put them.  I've considered going to the low-level file
routines but was hoping to use as much as possible of what ACL already
does.  Inspecting an open binary file shows a field called CCL::FBLOCK
which I was hoping might be a pointer to a ParamBlockRec but it doesn't
seem to be (or I've done something wrong with the record definition).

I need to know a couple of things.  Can I make use of FBLOCK in some way
to accomplish what I need to, and if so what kinds of problems might I
create for Lisp's file management?  Any help is appreciated.
Paul Krueger (plkrueger@serc.3m.com)