21.2.2 Recognizing the stream element type

We know that the stream will read from a file using file-stream functionality and that the stream element type will be simple-char . The following defines a method on stream-element-type to return the correct element type.

(defmethod stream-element-type ((stream unicode-ls-stream))

  'simple-char)

stream-element-type

Generic Function

Package: common-lisp

The function stream-element-type is implemented as a generic function. Depending on the stream, a method should be defined for this generic function that takes a stream as its argument and returns the element type of the stream.