Questions, comments and clarifications on clarifications

[Guy Steele <gls@THINK-AQUINAS.ARPA>]

    Date: Sun, 15 Dec 85 16:35 EST
    From: Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW@SCRC-QUABBIN.ARPA>
    425: A new argument, :ELEMENT-TYPE, to FILE-LENGTH is proposed, but the
    proposal doesn't say what it means.  I'd like to hear what this argument
    is supposed to be defined to mean, expressed in a way that is
    implementation-independent in any sense, such that this argument could
    ever be used in a portable program and relied upon to do any specific
    thing in particular.

Sorry it wasn't clean.  FILE-LENGTH is defined to return the length of a
file measured in units of ELEMENT-TYPE.  FILE-LENGTH now is guaranteed
to work only on an open stream, and it uses the ELEMENT-TYPE specified
when the stream was opened.  The proposal is to allow FILE-LENGTH to
take any pathname, but in that case it may be necessary to specify an
ELEMENT-TYPE explicitly in order to get the answer you want.

    439: What is COMPILEDP defined to do if you give it a lexical closure
    over a function that is compiled?

I would say it should return T.

    443: Do you also want to say that APROPOS might find some specific
    symbols more than once, assuming that 187 is accepted?

Yep.