Re: Lisp Stream API.

> 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'.