Hrvoje> Martin Buchholz <martin(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: Hrvoje> Why? If lstreams are properly managed in frob blocks, shouldn't their Hrvoje> "allocation" and "deallocation" be a very cheap operation? It's not so much that deallocation isn't cheap, but that garbage-collection needs to search all of memory. So Lisp allocation (``consing'') of any kind is expensive, and the more lisp objects you have, the more expensive the next gc becomes. What we really want is a modern generational garbage collector (what Java's Hotspot calls an `object nursery') but implementing this in XEmacs is HARD. Hrvoje> Java and CL streams are a part of the interface, while lstreams are Hrvoje> more of an implementation helper, aimed at simplifying XEmacs C base. Hrvoje> It's quite reasonable that they differ from whatever Java and CL have. I'm suggesting that lstreams perhaps should be more than just an implementation helper, and be available to lisp code for the same reasons that Java makes them available to Java code. Martin