Lisp Stream API.

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an ceathr? l? d?ag de m? na Samhain, scr?obh stephen at xemacs.org: 

 >  > Can someone explain to this no-formal-education-in-the-language Lisp user
 >  > why we don?t have (with-open-file ...) and the rest of the Common Lisp
 >  > stream API in XEmacs Lisp?
 > 
 > Mostly hysterical raisins, I would guess.  I suppose the main issue is
 > that Emacs is an interactive text editor with a strong bias toward
 > "slurp it ALL into an Emacs buffer and operate on it there".  If you
 > actually have an open I/O stream (pipe, network) then we do support
 > those, with comint and so on, but in a quite different way from
 > line-oriented streams (for example).
 > 
 >  > (insert-file-contents ...) with offsets doesn?t really cut it for
 >  > things like Perlish line processing.
 > 
 > I don't understand what you mean by "Perlish line processing".  The
 > closest I can come up with is
 > 
 > (progn
 >   (find-file "some/file")
 >   (while (not (eobp))
 >     (function-that-operates-on-a-line (point) (point-at-eol))
 >     (forward-line 1)))
 > 
 > which demonstrates the "file-at-a-gulp" attitude.  I suppose if you're
 > really worried about memory usage you could do partial buffering with
 > insert-file-contents as you mention, but the actual "read-line"
 > function would still just be `forward-line'.

My problem is the memory usage, and my laptop?s tendency to overheat. For
example, I have a natural-language dictionary with each entry on a separate
line and I?m generating a .db index; the memory usage is stupid. The same
will be true for anyone working on Unihan.txt or big database dumps. 

-- 
Santa Maradona, priez pour moi!