"save" action with existing file differs depending on Lisp

Hello everyone,

The effect of save ("foo", ...) when "foo" already exists
depends on the Lisp implementation. Clisp clobbers "foo",
CMUCL prints an error message. I don't know what GCL does.

It seems best to have a consistent action here. Raymond Toy
suggests that can be achieved through using the the :if-exists 
option to open. Any opinions about the appropriate setting
for this flag? I vote for clobbering the output file.
Another option is to have an additional optional argument to
"save" to force clobbering, but do not clobber as default.

I guess whatever we decide on in this context might be 
applied to others in which Maxima writes an output file.
So perhaps we should be careful to choose well.

This situation is reported as bug #1058626, although the
entire content of the bug report is replicated here.

regards,
Robert Dodier


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! 
http://my.yahoo.com