Common Lisp IO and Formatting (The Universe Known as LISP)

6 Common Lisp IO and Formatting

File System Concepts

This section discusses the Common Lisp interface to file systems. The model used by this interface assumes that:

files are named by filenames (files)
a filename can be represented by a pathname object (filename) (pathname)
given a pathname, a stream can be constructed that connects to a file whose filename it represents (stream).

Pathnames and namestrings¹¹ are two kinds of objects that substitute for filenames in Common Lisp (pathname class)

Files and Filenames
Pathnames and Pathspecs
Streams
Common Lisp Formatting

Footnotes

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namestring: a string that represents a filename using either the standardized notation for naming logical pathnames or some implementation-defined notation for naming a physical pathname.