The &quot;In Depth&quot;[0] page addresses that a tiny bit.<p>In summary, 3L drops explicit support for filesystems. Instead the system just provides a mapping of labels to storage blocks. From there those blocks can be utilized in any fashion you like. A filesystem library can be written to manage its set of blocks as it pleases. A database can skip the overhead of a filesystem and directly access the blocks to improve performance.<p>But yes, assuming you have imported the filesystem library (which has probably already been done assuming you are at the REPL) then you can process files as regular lists of lisp data (or in whatever language you want really). Not sure that is really that special though since you can already do that.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3lproject.org&#x2F;in-depth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3lproject.org&#x2F;in-depth</a>