[q-lang-users] Just starting with Q

[Burton S. <kr...@gm...>]

Hi Everyone,

I just started working with Q and I seem to be running in a newbie
problem that I can't seem to get around.  My first little function I
am trying to write would be a copy of the Unix 'cat' utility, which I
thought would be rather simple.  I found the example for 'fcopy' in
the manual and made a file 'cat' (the Q source file) containing the
following code:

public cat F;

cat F = () if feof F;
      = writes (freads F) || cat F otherwise;

And then in the interpreter i do the following:

[.q/] run cat
[.q/cat] def F = fopen "cat" "r"
[.q/cat] cat F
cat <<File>>
[.q/cat] cat::cat F
cat <<File>>
[.q/cat] whos cat

cat             function symbol defined in /home/kruhft/.q/cat
                cat X1

As you can see, there seems to be some sort of problem but I can't
seem to figure it out (hence my asking here ;-).  I tried playing
around with the interpreter and file handles and noticed that <<File>>
seems to be returned on errors during file operations, but I don't
understand how that's happening on a freshly opened file.

Any help or suggestions for this newbie problem? TIA

-- 
burton samograd                                                kr...@gm...
kruhft.boldlygoingnowhere.org              www.myspace.com/kruhft