Stream Buffering Question

["David A. Moon" <Moon%SCRC-TENEX@SCRC-RIVERSIDE.ARPA>]

    Date: Tue 24 Apr 84 12:59:11-MST
    From: Stan Shebs <SHEBS@UTAH-20.ARPA>

    Excelsior says nothing about how streams are to be buffered.  This
    is important when building editors etc.  The presence of listen and
    read-char-no-hang (pp 293-294) would seem to imply that unbuffered
    I/O is possible, but I couldn't find anything that could be used
    to declare whether a given stream is to be buffered or not.  What's
    the official propaganda?

I believe the official propaganda is that Common Lisp does not provide
I/O facilities for building editors.  In order to read control characters
one at a time from the keyboard, you have to go outside of Common Lisp
and do something implementation-dependent.  You have to do the same in
order to maintain a display on a screen.  These operations seem like
good candidates for standardization in a future second revision of Common
Lisp, but obviously there are a lot more implementation issues and choices
surrounding them than with CAR or REPLACE.

Incidentally, the Excelsior edition of the manual was superseded five
months ago by the Mary Poppins edition of the manual.  I believe the
First edition is supposed to be in the bookstores "soon", like in six
weeks, but I don't know whether my information is accurate.