Question about UIOP: Any reason GET-TEMPORARY-FILE couldn't be exported?

[Faré]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 5:48 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net> wrote:
> I am translating some existing code that does something like the following:
>
> concatenate f1 and f2 > temp file 1
> concatenate f2 and f1 (i.e., reverse concat) > temp file 2
> compute function of temp file 1
> compute function of temp file 2
> return minimum of f(temp file1), f(temp file2)
>
> I did this using "cat" for which it is more convenient to have the name
> of the file than the stream.
>
> In general, when invoking the shell, the shell "speaks" names, not CL
> streams.
>
> Now, as you said, I could simply replicate the logic of
> GET-TEMPORARY-FILE, but since GET-TEMPORARY-FILE pretty much replicates
> the interface of mktemp, which the shell wizards consider to be
> valuable, I think there's precedent for something like
> GET-TEMPORARY-FILE being supplied.  Although, perhaps calling it
> GET-TEMPORARY-FILENAME would be better.
>
> Is there some reason it would be inappropriate to export this?
>
It's an unintentional omission indeed that
UIOP/STREAM::GET-TEMPORARY-FILE wasn't exported. I thought I had
exported it, but I failed to. The function has existed since 3.1.2
(i.e. the first stable 3.1 release).

Note that in most cases, you'll have cleaner code using
WITH-TEMPORARY-FILE, though (also to be considered debugged since
3.1.2).

Note that for security reasons, a better (but non-portable) solution
would be instead be using mkstemps or mkostemps.

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