Re: binary vs non-binary ports

[Alex Shinn <foof@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At Fri, 17 Sep 2004 10:44:14 -1000 (HST), Shiro Kawai wrote:
> 
> [...] I feel character encoding conversion is much wider topic
> than the target of this srfi, so I'd rather suggest to leave it
> to another srfi.

Yes, I had intended to propose <encoding> as being an unspecified
encoding mechanism (just a placeholder), with the possible exception
of the "binary" encoding.  I definitely do not want to get into
character encoding issues in this SRFI.

> If people wish to have the means of ensuring a binary port in
> portable way, I'd rather have open-binary-{input|output}-file,
> which can be easily implemented on both (a) implementations that
> doesn't distinguish binary/character port, and (b) implementations
> that requires binary/character distinction at port creation.

I like open-binary-{input,output}-file better.  For completeness, if
we add this we also probably want the binary-port? and character-port?
predicates, though I don't suspect they will be used much any more
than people always check the result of input-port? before reading from
a port.

-- 
Alex