File Operations

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date:     Thu, 18 Dec 86 12:03 EDT
    From:     ELIOT%cs.umass.edu@RELAY.CS.NET

    ....
    Because of this I think that special handling of errors is called for.
    I would suggest that keyword arguments be added to these functions
    which control this behavior.
    ....
    This is obviously redundant with handling these situations in the error
    system.  However, we won't have an error system generally implemented
    for quite some time.

I don't understand why this change to Common Lisp would receive widespread
implementation earlier than the error-handling facility change to Common
Lisp.  Either way it's different from what people have implemented now.

At Symbolics, and earlier at MIT, we have had a lot of experience with
error handling, especially in file system operations.  We used to use an
enable-error argument scheme similar to what you suggest, but found it
to be unsatisfactory and switched to a uniformly condition-based scheme.