start-interactive-top-level

Arguments: stream function args &key initial-bindings

It is the purpose of some processes to communicate with a user over a separate dedicated *terminal-io* stream. (This user is not necessarily a human -- it might be a socket connection to another program, possibly on a different host.) This function is intended as a convenient way to start a process which maintains its own bindings for the standard Common Lisp dynamic variables. *terminal-io* is first bound to stream. Then the process-initial-bindings slot of the process is examined, and if it is nil, the bindings in the initial-bindings keyword to this function are established. (If process-initial-bindings is not nil, the value of the initial-bindings argument is ignored.) The default value for the initial-bindings argument is *cl-default-special-bindings*. Then function is applied to the arguments. Note that the arguments argument is a single list, not an &rest argument.

The name of this function implies a dichotomy between functions created to do predetermined computation which might not need to bind these Lisp-package variables, and those which interact with a user or other external process. Such a dichotomy is reasonable, but of course, only approximates the diversity of real applications.

See top-level.htm for more information on the top level.

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This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.