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From: gumby@mit-eddie.UUCP (David Vinayak Wallace)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: I/O operations in programming languages
Message-ID: <666@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 28-Aug-83 17:11:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.666
Posted: Sun Aug 28 17:11:24 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 29-Aug-83 17:07:32 EDT
References: <108@csd1.UUCP> <2169@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 15

Well, one good thing about c is that IO isn't really part of the language at
all; it's all done via functions in libraries.

Modern languages are starting to use streams (e.g. Common Lisp, Ada).
Streams are generic objects all of which do a certain number of standard
operations and which can be extended for special purposes.  Then you can
have a special stream which reads or writes special structures for some
operation.  Then other programmers can access these streams without knowing
their structure.  The problem with embedding IO in the language definition
(i.e. BASIC) is that each programmer must grok the file (and device) format.

Device IO probably can't be improved.  But maybe we can just flush files, or
at least produce a better model?

david