Subject: Re: Reading a sequence of (characters|bytes) from a file in Common Lisp
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1996/01/07
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <19960107T124352Z@arcana.naggum.no>

[T. Kurt Bond]

|   I've looked in CLTL1 and CLTL2 (I don't have access to the ANSI Common
|   Lisp standard, alas), but perhaps I'm missing something:
|   
|   	Is there any way in Common Lisp to read a sequence (of characters
|   	or bytes) of a specified length from a file all at once?

ANSI CL has `read-sequence', which destructively modify a sequence with
elements read from a stream, and `write-sequence', which writes elements
from the sequence directly to a stream.  "An efficient implementation is
more likely to exist for the case where the sequence is a vector with the
same element type as the stream" (from the standard).

#<Erik 3030007432>
-- 
the problem with this "information superhighway" is mainly that if you ask
people to go play in it, they don't even understand when they get run over.