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Date: Tue, 6 Jun 95 10:50:19 EDT From: tynor (Steve Tynor) Subject: IO To: NICE-ESG-Libs@atlanta.twr.com Steve Fisher wrote: | Of those so far suggested I favour `skip_to_next_line' as all the output | features start with put_, I do not expect any confusion. I agree: `skip_to' definitely connotes `input' to me too (how can you skip over something you haven't written yet? :-)) | Finally I note that in GENERAL we have the feature io : STD_FILES but | that STD_FILES has a state (stored in `default_output'). This means | that any software using put_xxxx must first store the default_ouput, | set it, put, and reset the original state. STD_FILES corresponds to | stdin, stdout or stderr so it would have been much more pleasant to | have stdin, stdout and stderr as three stateless streams rather than | io. Actually, since `io', `input', `error' etc. are typically implemented a once functions, so the initialization is implicit. In our current implementation, `io' is implemented as: io: STANDARD_FILES is -- Standard input and output once !!Result.make; ensure not_void: Result /= Void; end; and STANDARD_FILES' `make' is defined as: make is do set_output_default; end; and the various `input', `output' and `error' streams are initialized as : output: TEXT_STREAM is -- Standard output file local s : FD_IO; once !!s.open (1, "w"); !!Result.make (s); end; (of course, we need to rename our class to STD_FILES for compatibility with the PELKS name, but you get the idea...). All the initialization of the streams is implicit -- the caller need not do anything more than a call to a `put_' or `read_' routine (e.g. `io.put_integer (1)' or even `io.error.put_integer(1)') to get everything initialized, etc. Steve
