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Michael Sperber <sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> 6. It would be great if there were a mechanism specified for passing >> additional arguments (options) between the levels. Learning from >> other existing I/O libraries, it is a recurring problem that you >> need to pass funny little hints (e.g. access permission flags) down >> (and sometimes up) the protocol stack to do what you need to do. I >> am not talking about arcane IOCTLs, but over simple things like >> opening a file for writing with the right attributes to actually be >> able to write to it (this is no joke, R5RS open-output-file does not >> specify what happens if the file exists.) > > That's definitely true. At the time of writing, I didn't have a good > solution, so I stuck with using separate procedures for the common > options. (I really dislike keyword arguments for various reasons.) I > have a better idea now, and I'll try to do something about the issue > with the next revision. Having said that, note that I fully expect platform-specific options to come up, as well as platform-specific methods for creating readers and writers. That's not inherently bad, given that the sets of available options *are* platform-specific. It would be nice to standardize on those as well, but they don't fall in the purview of this particular SRFI. (The SML Basis actually has a fourth, OS-specific layer, with variants for Unix and Windows.) -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla