From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Simple binary I/O question Date: 1999/03/24 Message-ID: <3131225340246095@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 458188373 References: <36F7ACCD.B3ABE6B8@innerworkings.co.uk> mail-copies-to: never Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Ewan Dennis | I'm trying to barf binary floating point values out of a LISP environment | and into a file. that is actually not a meaningful request. | The file streaming stuff seems to be geared towards bytes and text. This | would be fine if it let you just throw the bits of an IEEE (hah) standard | single-float onto a stream. why do you need this? do you need to talk to a different program? do you think (or know) that reading and writing floating-point numbers is a real bottle-neck in your application? | I'm obviously missing something simple. Could someone please put me out | of my misery? could be you simply need FASL-WRITE and FASL-READ in Allegro CL 4.3.2. these functions preserve the notion of type that exists in memory, and which does _not_ exist in a file to which you have just dumped a bunch of bytes, just like raw bytes in memory doesn't have crucial type knowledge in C, but it has in Common Lisp. as I told someone else: chuck the C mind-set and re-evaluate the problem. #:Erik