[gobo-eiffel-develop] Re: [exml] References: url and pipework

[Andreas L. <no...@sb...>]

Posting crosspostend to gobo-eiffel-develop.

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Alexander Kogtenkov wrote:

> The recent discussions in this and other mailing lists
> and comp.lang.eiffel showed an interest in basic
> and extended I/O facilities abstracted to streams/
> readers and alike. While extended facilities might
> be pretty advanced and are subject to long-term
> development, the basic things should be available
> in every Eiffel implementation.
> 
> At the moment the implementations differ mostly
> in some minor points, namely class and feature
> names. And sometimes the classes are overloaded
> with too much functionality (e.g., ELKS class FILE
> represents both file system descriptor and file handle).
> 
> I suggest to work out the proposal of the NICE
> library standard that covers
>    Input streams:
>       General
>       System (stdin, file, pipe)
>       Data (read_integer, etc.)
>       Proxy (works through other input stream)
>    Output streams - almost the same structure

Personally I am totaly happy if NICE is going to rework ELKS as planned. I
fear if we ask them to decide on a general io framework it would slow down
the proccess currently in the works as well.

Why not try to implement it in GOBO first and when we feel it is stable
and usefull submit it to NICE. This has IMO 2 advantages:

1) The users get what they need sooner
2) Nice gets a well thought out and well tested proposal

ISE is working on fixed sized integers in their new release. If other
vendors support it, we (GOBO-team) are fine, I think.

> As all the classes are tightly related, I think it's
> better to consider them as a whole and not on
> class-by-class basis for consistency reasons.

I am not so sure. The most important thing IMO is the abstract IO API,
which is totaly unlrelated to the other things. Various implementation may
be releated, but implementations can come and go. Important is the
interface.

> All these stuff can be done as augmentation to
> GOBO project, but my feeling is that it is better
> suited for the standard Eiffel.

I`d be happier if NICE can revamp ARRAY and STRING is a reasonable amount
of time and shortly after all Eiffel compilers adopt the new
standard. Looking at the past this task is not to be underestimated - It's
just with the GOBO effort: I'd like to see NICE succeed with a small job
rather than fail with a big one.

regards,
Andreas