[Xsb-development] Binary files, ISO, and XSB

[Terrance S. <ts...@cs...>]

All:

There's a rather annoying issue with XSB, binary files, and ISO.
First of all, binary and textual files are the same on UNIX, but
differ on Windows.  The ISO standard specifies that open/3 opens
textual streams, and that if binary streams are to be opened, then one
should use open/4 with an appropriate option.  Thus the default is
textual.

In XSB, however, our default is to open binary files, both when we use
open/3 and when we use see or tell.  This makes a difference for
instance with the compiler where when we open (or tell) the object
file.  We need to do this in binary mode if we dont want a corrupted
.xwam file (as I just learned from a debugging session).

So we have two choices.  First, we could make textual streams the
default, and change the copiler to open binary files when appropriate
(and who knows about other problems that could arise).  Second, we
could decide just not to conform to the ISO standard on this point.

I'm leaning towards the second option for now, but perhaps others have
insights or opinions?

Terry