Function streams

[Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>]

OK, I believe that some sort of inheritance is going to be extremely
useful -- perhaps essential -- for these function-streams.  It may be
that flavors are the right thing, but it is pretty clear to me that we
are not ready to standardize on this, versus all the other inheritance
mechanisms that people have proposed.  Flavor-mixing looks wrong to me,
but maybe that's just my lack of experience with such things.  Maybe in
a year flavors will be my favorite language construct.

In any event, we don't want to clutter up Common Lisp with half-baked
stabs at object-oriented mechanisms that would get in the way of
more complete implementation-dependent mechanisms or that would be ugly
relics if Common Lisp ever standardizes on one sort of flavor-oid.
There seem to be two reasonable courses of action:

1. Forget about function streams as far as the white pages are
concerned.  Any implementation-specific or yellow-pages active-object
system can provide its own version of such streams, without having to
compete with the kludge I proposed.

2. If we can define a non-controversial interface to such streams,
document that in the white pages, but leave open the question of what
sort of inheritance is used to provide the actions.  Then we have a
standardized hook, without getting into the hairy issues.  Is my proposed
interface acceptable to all groups?  If not, are there specific
counter-proposals?  I am not fanatical about this interface -- anything
similar would do, and would be preferable if it fit neatly into flavors
or whatever.

-- Scott