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From: gf0c+@andrew.cmu.edu (Gregory S. Fox)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Allegro Lisp question
Message-ID: 
Date: 25 Sep 89 05:02:18 GMT
Organization: Humanities and Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 21


     I have a question regarding Allegro Common Lisp and how it
implements certain features of the Mac's OS.  Specifically, I
need to know how perform certain operations with strings, and my
Lisp programming skills are somewhat weak.

     There's a special function (%get-string pointer), which takes
a variable of type 'pointer and returns  [our beloved]  PASCAL string.
I want it to return a Lisp string  (of type 'string or 'simple-string);
ie- a string that's longer than 255 bytes.  This is complicated by the
fact that I don't know how Lisp strings are stored-  I know they are
allocated arrays, but are they null terminated?

     There's a function, something like (with-pointer ((var pointer)+) form))
that binds a variable to a pointer, but its application to my problem
escapes me.  There must be a simple way to do this, though...

     If you can clue me in, bless you...

-Greg
gf0c@andrew.cmu.edu