On Mar 11, 2010, at 12:08 PM, Alessio Stalla wrote: […]
I don't know how hard it is, but at this point what do you think about having an abstract base class/interface (say, Resource) which only has a name property and from which you can extract an input stream, and have this class be extended by Pathname, JarURLResource, GenericURLResource, whatever? Some operations on pathnames really do only make sense for file pathnames, not arbitrary URLs.
I'm definitely not wedded to cramming everything into Lisp pathname, so would welcome the exploration of other implementation options here. The jar Pathname work took a lot more effort than I originally thought, so I want to do as much exploring of reworking things without coding. So, I take it you propose a Java-side abstraction here for Resource. How would this work for the Lisp user who wants to specify an option to LOAD? Would we create CLOS abstractions for LOAD that specialize on the type? -- "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now."