Subject: Re: hetrogenous binary streams
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 16 Dec 2000 01:23:11 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3185918591783243@naggum.net>

* David Morse <david_morse@my-deja.com>
| I agree with you in principle, and I would love to write a text file,
| but I don't think its possible to write floats as text files without
| roundoff errors creeping in.  Or am I wrong?

  Yes.  We have an important principle in Common Lisp: Write-read
  consistency.  That means that whenever an object is printed out and
  *print-readably* is true, reading it back in produces an object that
  consistent with the object printed out.  Achieving this is not always
  cheap, but it is a very, very important property of a language that
  defines the operations write and read for its objects through textual
  representation.  Inferior languages may not go the great lengths that
  are required to maintain write-read consistency, however.

#:Erik
-- 
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