On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 16:02, Nuutti Kotivuori wrote:
> skaller@users.sourceforge.net wrote:

> But - there's nothing ambiguous about slurping an entire file into a
> string. And there's nothing complex about doing that portably.

A file is an abstraction, meaning it is a collection of 
access methods. There's no 'bytes' in a file, the bytes 
are just values return from the read function or submitted 
to the write function.

Many files exist with many different access methods.
Even the same physical disk data can be different
file abstractions: eg Unix directory.

The data on an unbuffered non-blocking serial communication 
link cannot be read with the block reading algorithm I gave:
end of data occurs before end of file -- if there is an end
of file .. eg it won't work on a raw terminal.

Yes, I know we have strayed a long way from the original
question, but I think the issue here is: the manual
isn't precise enough, but making it so is in fact very
difficult, so the Ocaml team is 'forgiven'. That's what
I think I was trying to say :D

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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