I just looked at it, and it is mostly garbage, unless you happen to
have a PDP-10, Multics, or Lisp-Machine
version of Maxima. I don't know what a mfile-object is. Maybe it is
like a CL "pathname" but messed up
because the pathnames all looked different on those machines.
I do remember the following, from when address space was one of the
limits encountered by "large"
problems.
When a data object became very large, one could make it smaller by
writing it out to disk, where common
subexpressions would be recognized, and then when the expression was
read back in from disk, it would
take less space.
This is probably not so important now, but is this still going to happen?
I think it is important that when data is already shared in memory, that
the same sharing happen after
it is saved and re-loaded. This can be done in CL by setting
*print-circle* to t.
So far as I can tell, this is NOT done by the dskfn functions now.
RJF
On 8/31/2010 1:32 PM, Dieter Kaiser wrote:
> I had a look at the Lisp code in dskfn.lisp. I think we have some code
> which we can cut out to clean up the code. I have tried it and I have
> got no problems to cut out the following variables and functions:
>
> dsksavep
> dskave
> mfilep
> mfile
> dskget
> unstorep
> i-$unstore
> i-$store
> filelength
> filelist
> $filename
> $filenum
> $device
> $direc
> $storenum
> $dskall
> $pagepause
> pagepause1
>
> None of the Maxima symbols is documented. The code restores
> mfile-objects from a disk. I think there is no longer code to store
> mfile-objects in Maxima. Therefore, all of the above functions and
> variables are no longer in use.
>
> The only user function of interest in the file dskfn.lisp is $save and
> the related functions.
>
> The predicate function mfilep is used in meval1. This code has to be cut
> out too. One benefit is, that the evaluator is cleaned up too. But it is
> no problem. Some of the symbols and functions are defined in mlisp.lisp
> and suprv1.lisp.
>
> By the way: I am working on a German translation of the Reference
> Manual. I have reached the chapter about 'File input and output'.
> Therefore, I had a look at the code.
>
> Dieter Kaiser
>
>
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