This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 68 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 68 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Sebastian Egner <sebastian.egner@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > In the Mathematica programming language you can open a file for > adding stuff using the OpenAppend operation. This operation has a > number of options, with defaults, each of which can be overwritten > using Mathematica rules. In Mathematica, that is the mechanism to > pass options---it works very well; a lot to type, but I never made a > mistake and the defaults work well. > > The options of OpenAppend are described here: > > http://documents.wolfram.com/v4/RefGuide/OpenAppend.html > > As you see, the options convey information that is being used to > format the output sent to the file. Sure---but exactly what corresponds to FILE-OPTIONS is explicit, namely "append." The stuff that corresponds to the "format" sits in the transcoder---and that indeed does have a default. > As a hypothetical example, think of a SRFI defining the following thing > for distributed execution: [...] > > In practice this will only be possible if a number of things fit together: > 1. The entire negotiation between language and OS can be represented > in a data structure. Sure, but this is a job for a serialization library---READ and WRITE as in R5RS are not that library. (In fact, R5RS specifies at least one object that *must not* have an external representation, namely the EOF object.) So, it seems this should be addressed in a separate SRFI. > The last point might not really be essential, but I have seen great > programs to find out if a file descriptor in C is connected to file > or a ptty because in one case you might to do this, while in the > other you might do that. Of course, this information could be passed > from the guy who made the file descriptor to the guy who uses it on > a side-channel, but in UNIX that is not what happens; you poke > around with fcntl/ioctls until you can guess it. Hm. I'll think about it. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla