A number of classes and functions are provided in the
stream
package that allow you to define your own input and output streams. The user defined streams can use the standard I/O functions, and methods specializing on the relevant user defined stream class can also be defined to provide specific implementations of other I/O functions. Note that some changes have been made to the standard I/O functions to allow for this. For example,
stream-element-type
is now a generic function. See the
common-lisp
package reference entries in the
LispWorks Reference Manual
for alterations to standard functions, and the
stream
package entries for more details on user defined streams.