On Page 100 of the User Guide (from the Help menu in the IDE), it says
"If the pathname specifies a file with an extension .EXE, then the saved image is appended to the .EXE file as a .lisp segment. Any contents of the .EXE file are preserved. Note that if a .lisp segment already exists, another one will be created. This is probably not what you want. In future versions, the existing .lisp segment will be overwritten. "
This suggests that there must be an executable already present if you want to create executables with Corman Lisp. This executable would need to be pre-programmed to load itself with LOAD-IMAGE (which is documented as being able to recognize executables and load the .lisp segment) and then call TOP-LEVEL. Perhaps one of the executables that comes with the distribution is a stub meant for this purpose. If so, then the documentation is lacking. Perhaps SAVE-IMAGE should be altered so that it copies this stub to "pathname" and then adds the .lisp segment, overwriting any pre-existing file, instead of assuming that "pathname" will already point to an appropriate file.
On Page 100 of the User Guide (from the Help menu in the IDE), it says
"If the pathname specifies a file with an extension .EXE, then the saved image is appended to the .EXE file as a .lisp segment. Any contents of the .EXE file are preserved. Note that if a .lisp segment already exists, another one will be created. This is probably not what you want. In future versions, the existing .lisp segment will be overwritten. "
This suggests that there must be an executable already present if you want to create executables with Corman Lisp. This executable would need to be pre-programmed to load itself with LOAD-IMAGE (which is documented as being able to recognize executables and load the .lisp segment) and then call TOP-LEVEL. Perhaps one of the executables that comes with the distribution is a stub meant for this purpose. If so, then the documentation is lacking. Perhaps SAVE-IMAGE should be altered so that it copies this stub to "pathname" and then adds the .lisp segment, overwriting any pre-existing file, instead of assuming that "pathname" will already point to an appropriate file.