Why does FILE-LENGTH take a stream rather a pathname?

From: Peter Seibel (peter_at_javamonkey.com)
Date: 02/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 01:44:39 GMT

I'm guessing that on some historically important filesystem the
natural way to get the length of a file was the Lisp way: opening it
and getting the information from the stream. If so, what was that OS?

I only ask becuase it may seem strange to folks used to Unix-centric
languages where that information is available without opening the
file.

-Peter 

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      peter@javamonkey.com
         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp

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