reading a string from keyboard



Hi,

I just recently noticed that readline(true) (or readline(false)) no 
longer reads a string from the keyboard (stdin). It used to work before 
5.15 - probably this was not the correct way of doing it but couldn't 
figure out anything else at that time. Note that I want to read a string 
- not expression. This string can be, for example, a path name which is 
not a valid expression obviously.

After testing a bit, I found out that the following seems to work now:

readline(?\*standard\-input\*)

where the stream refers to the corresponding lisp stream name that 
points to standard input. This also works well with wxmaxima (which 
communicates via pipes I suppose). Is this the right way of doing this? 
Meaning that is it standard enough that it should work with future 
maxima releases as well.

It might be a good idea to include the pre-existing stream names that 
are accessible in maxima in the manual - the previous one was
not trivial to figure out.

Jussi Eloranta
Cal State Northridge