David Trudgett  <wpower@zeta.org.au.nospamplease> wrote:
+---------------
| Your suggestion is OK if you like that sort of thing, but I
| have a natural aversion to using arbitrary values as booleans...
+---------------

But remember, this is Common Lisp, not Scheme. In CL the *only*
distinguished boolean is NIL as "false" -- *everything* else is "true".
Plus, we're using (READ-LINE stream NIL NIL) here, where the outcome is
*guaranteed* [absent an I/O error throwing an exception] to be either
a [possibly zero-length] string ["true"] or NIL. So you've already got
an unambiguous boolean result, and thus (WHEN LINE ...) is IMHO a more
natural way than (UNLESS (NULL LINE) ...) to say what you're really
trying to do.

The same is true of READ-CHAR but *not* of READ, which can return NIL,
which is why people tend to use the following variation when using READ:

    (with-open-file (stream "filename")
      (loop with eof = (list nil)
	    for form = (read stream nil eof)
	    until (eq form eof) do
        (process-one-form form)))

And of course some prefer to use the "WHILE (NOT (EQ FORM EOF))"
variant here, for parallelism with other LOOPs that use WHILE.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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