Cleanup Issue UNSOLICITED-MESSAGES
- Category
- Clarification
- References
- Chapter 1, Section 1.5, Working draft of standard
Problem: Is it legal for an implementation to produce unsolicited output, e.g., GC notifications, autoload heralds, and progress messages from COMPILE-FILE or LOAD?Proposal
No output may be produced by functions other than that specified in the standard or due to the signalling of conditions detected by the function.
Unsolicited output, such as GC notifications and autoload heralds, should not go directly to the stream held by any Common Lisp stream variable but can go indirectly to *TERMINAL-IO* by using a synonym stream to that variable.
Output such as progress reports from LOAD and COMPILE are "solicited", and are not covered by this issue. See issue COMPILE-AND-LOAD-VERBOSE.
Rationale
The intent of the proposal is stated informally as follows: if a file is written to, no implementation-generated output should end up in the file except as stated above.
The intent of paragraph 2 of the proposal is that implementations are forced to make such streams possible to redirect without redirecting the Common Lisp stream itself.
Current Practice
Adoption Cost
Small. Implementations and their documentation may have to change slightly.Benefits
Portability. This proposal has very little impact on implementations, but helps the user by explicitly stating the disposition of unsolicited output.Conversion Cost
See Adoption Cost.Aesthetics
None.Discussion
Edit History
- 8-JAN-89, Version 1 by Masinter
- 6-FEB-89, Version 2 by Chapman
- 10-MAR-89, Version 3 by Chapman (added discussion)
- 21-MAR-89, Version 4 by Chapman
- 24-MAR-89, Version 5 by Chapman
- 6-APR-89, Version 6 by Chapman (added amendment from 3/89 mtg)