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Non-standard extensions to Lisp 1.5 to read and write to the filesystem.
Lisp 1.5 had only READ
, which read one S-Expression at a time, and various forms of PRIN*
functions, which printed to the line printer. There was also PUNCH
, which wrote to a card punch. It does not seem that there was any concept of an interactive terminal.
See Appendix E, OVERLORD - THE MONITOR
, and Appendix F, LISP INPUT
AND OUTPUT
.
For our purposes, to save the current state of the Lisp system it should be sufficient to print the current contents of the oblist to file; and to restore a previous state from file, to overwrite the contents of the oblist with data from that file.
Hence functions SYSOUT and SYSIN, which do just that.