Re: Building a "loadable" tar file.

Subject: Re: Building a "loadable" tar file.
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/03/23
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3162824624300417@naggum.no>

* Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@parades.rm.cnr.it>
| 1 - Yes.  I'd like LOAD to recognize a file which was the result of a
|     collection operation of many fasl files, and "do the right" thing
|     with it.
| 
| 2 - This would require a change in the standard.

  huh?  why is this?

| 3 - Some CL implementations allow you to actually 'cat' fasl files
|     together for the benefit of LOAD.

  if we regard a Common Lisp source file as a sequence of individual
  top-level forms that does not know about file boundaries between them,
  you can easily concatenate source files and end up with something that
  can be loaded as a unit.  if we regard the compiled fasl files the same
  way, and this can obviously be done if each top-level form is saved to
  disk individually, possibly including some file-specific prologue that is
  generated by the compiler, there really is nothing special involved in
  concatenating files.

  if you can load from a stream, you can load from a concatenated-stream,
  so there should already be support in the standard for the whole concept.

#:Erik