Re: buffered output and prompting

[SANDRA <LOOSEMORE@UTAH-20.ARPA>]

Somehow I think this discussion of whether FORCE-OUTPUT can or can't write
a newline is missing the mark.  Leaving aside the issue whether this business
about continuation markers in output records could even be implemented with
the primitives provided by your operating system, restricting a low-level
detail of the implementation like this to support a high-level concept like
reading with a prompt strikes me as being counterproductive.  I think that
prompting the user to type something on the keyboard is a common enough
situation that it would be worthwhile to provide a standardized, high-level
interface for doing so.  After all, if functions to handle situations that
don't even occur in CL (like get-setf-method-multiple-value!) were deemed
important enough to include in the language specification, it ought to be
worthwhile to provide a high-level hook for a situation that does occur
quite often.  Not only would this free the programmer from having to write a
lot of grungy code, but implementors would have maximum freedom to present the
prompt in whatever way is most compatible with the rest of the user interface.

-Sandra
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