interaction of LOAD and CURRENT-INPUT-STREAM

[Jonathan A Rees <JAR @ MIT-MC>]

    Date: 12 Mar 1985 11:22-EST
    From: mw%brandeis.csnet at csnet-relay.arpa

    1.  LOAD does not specify how it interacts with CURRENT-INPUT-STREAM or
    CURRENT-OUTPUT-STREAM while loading.  What is to be the preferred way
    of loading a bootstrap of the following form:

    (define! foo ...)

    (define! bar (foo (read)))

    ..complicated data to be processed by foo during load..

    It might be argued that this is bad style, but I am not convinced:
    such a bootstrap is less dependent on operating system file naming
    conventions than one with the data in a separate file.

I don't see any reason for LOAD and CURRENT-INPUT-STREAM to interact,
and I think it is much better for them not to.  If they don't interact
you have a much better invariants on each, e.g.: doing LOAD on a file is
the same as doing LOAD on a file consisting of the string "(begin "
appended to the file appended to the string ")".

What's wrong with writing

    (define! foo ...)

    (define! bar (foo '

      ..complicated data to be processed by foo during load..

    ))  ?

This way you don't need to do explicit I/O at all.

... And incidentally, I don't remember the rationale for having both
DEFINE! and DEFINE.  I understand why DEFINE shouldn't have hairy
syntax, but what does DEFINE! give you that the stripped-down DEFINE
doesn't?

Jonathan