Re: (r6rs io ports)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Mike Gran <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Ludovic Courtès address@hidden
>
>>> It would be easier.  When thinking about this, I was remembering or
>>> mis-remembering that, back in the 2009, you'd said some along the
>>> lines of ultimately standardizing on the R6RS ports codebase, and that
>>> I was to consider the work on Guile legacy ports as interrim.
>
> [...]
>
>> Heh, good point.  I don’t like the current port API: it’s low-level,
>> it’s C, it’s  undocumented, it forces users to access Guile internals,
>> etc.  But it’s widely used, in Guile and outside.  If (rnrs io ports)
>> were to be included in 2.0 (though I don’t think it should be a
>> showstopper), it would seem safer to choose a solution that is simple
>> and mostly orthogonal to the rest of Guile core.
>
>> Perhaps the move to a new port API (probably based on that of R6RS) can
>> be left for 2.2?  Hopefully, we’ll be much less relying on C by then,
>> which should make things easier.
>
>> What do you think?
>
> I think that if you want to move to a new port codebase, there is no
> need to add new features to the old one.

I think that if we can provide (rnrs io ports) with a reasonably small
effort, then it’s probably worth it (the only new feature would be EOL
handling, AFAICS).

And it’d be nice to have better coverage of this API, anyway, since it
already provides features not available in the native port API, such as
binary I/O.

Thanks,
Ludo’.