From: Pierre R. Mai
Subject: Re: Reading characters and bytes from the same stream
Date: 
Message-ID: <87ya8ftvyr.fsf@orion.dent.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de>
··@inferno.nirvananet (Hartmann Schaffer) writes:

> In article <··············@orion.dent.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de>,
> 	····@acm.org (Pierre R. Mai) writes:
> > ...
> > If your implementation offers gray streams, then you can hide the
> 
> i have seen references to gray streams several times now, but am not
> familiar with them.  what are they and where can i find a definition?

What is generally referred to as "Gray Streams" is David Gray's
proposed portable protocol for user-extensible streams.  The original
proposal can be found at:

ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/cl/cleanup/mail/stream-definition-by-user.mail

The concept also made it into the CLIM specification as Appendix D
(Common Lisp Streams).  The CLIM spec can be found at:

ftp://ftp.franz.com/pub/clim/clim-spec/

There is also some work going on at Franz to produce an extended
proposal in this area.  Quoting from Duane Rettig's posting from 26
Jan 2000 on c.l.l (<·············@beta.franz.com>):

> Because of this and further discussion, we have standardized on the
> term "octet" when we describe 8-bits specifically.  The proposal that
> resulted from this is part of a design of an I/O system, which will
> complement the current Gray streams system we currently have, but
> which will address various issues of stream mutivalency, multibyte
> character sets and locales, speed, and a few other problems that the
> CL spec and Gray streams don't currently address.  We hope to publish
> this proposal soon, long before our next major release.

See also previous postings on c.l.l on gray streams...

Regs, Pierre.

-- 
Pierre Mai <····@acm.org>         PGP and GPG keys at your nearest Keyserver
  "One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-
   bashing." [Microsoft memo, see http://www.opensource.org/halloween1.html]