Questions about OPEN

[Rob MacLachlan <RAM@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

    Well, if it's constructive to flame about the file system
interface at this point, then I will add that I agree the :direction
:probe is silly.  I also believe that requiring all of the
file/pathname functions to accept streams as arguments is silly.  It
seems to me that this symbol/namestring/stream/pathname foolishness is
a result of the confusion between streams and pathnames and strings
and symbols that is present in earlier lisps because they lack some of
the above.

    I think that it is totally silly to suggest that these operations
work on closed streams, since a closed stream can have no semantics
other than possibly its name, which could be better represented by a
pathname.  If we really want to do this sort of thing, then we should
define a File-Stream-Name function that returns the pathname
associated with a file stream so that people can get the name from a
stream.

My opinon may be slightly biased by the lack of any concept of an open
file in the Sesame filesystem that underlies Spice Lisp.

  Rob