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Re: Specification vs. Implementation

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.



Per Bothner wirte:
>Input streams might be useful, but I don't understand what
>output streams are for.

Michael Sperber wrote:
> They're there mainly for symmetry, for people who want to live
> exclusively in the streams layer.

I don't see the connection.  Input streams are a purely
functional "lazy list of bytes" abstraction.  Output
streams are just a duplicate set of functions that do
more-or-less the same as ports, as far as I can tell.
Output streams can be "translated" but is there any
reason you can't have a translated output port?

Useless symmetry is still useless, especially if it just
ends up being needless redundancy.

A true output stream api would work on "sequence of bytes" too.
The output operation would be something like this:

(output-byte stream byte)
Does not modify either argument.  Creates a new stream,
which is a copy of the 'stream' followed by the 'byte'.
(Lazy copying can be used in practice.)
--
	--Per Bothner
per@xxxxxxxxxxx   http://per.bothner.com/