Re: IO redirection in Elisp

[John C Ruttenberg <Ruttenberg>]

    In-Reply-To: John C Ruttenberg <Ruttenberg>, Tue, 18 Oct 83 07:03:08 EDT

    You should resend your message to T-DISCUSSION.
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If you still have a copy of this message, please resend it for me.  I
didn't keep a copy.

I think these hacks are more to the point in Elisp where you have to
open a channel and then select it.  In Maclisp, for example, you could do:

    (iota ( (standard-output "temp:junk.junk"))
        ...)

to get the effect of

    (iota ( (file "temp:junk.junk") ) (without file
        ...)

Except that each IO statement made its own decision as to where it was
going to write.  So there was a greater chance of it not working.

I like the effect you get on UNIX and in the TOOLS programs.  It's so
easy to write to standard output (as opposed to anywhere else) that you
nearly always do it.  But writing to standard-error is almost as
easy, so few programs fail to write their errors there.  Interesting to
see that Maclisp, whose IO system strongly resembles that of the
UNIX and TOOLS runtims misses this effect badly.  While Elisp, whose
IO model is so different seems to hit the nail on the head.
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