Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!zodiac!jupiter!andrew
From: andrew@jupiter.ADS.COM (Andrew Neuschatz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: What does LOAD do?
Message-ID: <7428@zodiac.UUCP>
Date: 31 Mar 89 01:22:38 GMT
Sender: news@zodiac.UUCP
Reply-To: andrew@ads.com (Andrew Neuschatz)
Organization: Advanced Decision Systems, Mt. View, CA (415) 960-7300
Lines: 17

I'm writing an equivalent of LOAD that can read streams besides those from
files (specifically from string input streams).  So I need to find an official
explanation of what Common Lisp LOAD does besides read s-expressions from a
file and EVAL them.  So far, all I know is that it saves the value of *PACKAGE*
and restores it afterwards, and something is done so that (EVAL-WHEN
(...LOAD...) ...) will work.  But can anyone tell me what else it does, if
anything, and how exactly it does the two things I know of?

This is underspecified in CLtL: "If the first argument [to LOAD] is a stream
rather  than a pathname, then LOAD determines what kind of stream it is and
loads directly from the stream."  (Page 426.)

Please e-mail to me.  I'll post a summary if I learn anything interesting.

Thanks
Andrew
andrew@ads.com