[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Leave readers and writers out of the report.

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This message is a formal comment which was submitted to formal-comment_at_r6rs.org, following the requirements described at: http://www.r6rs.org/process.html
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Submitter: William D Clinger
Email address: will_at_ccs.neu.edu
Issue type: Simplification
Priority: Major
Component: I/O
Report version: 5.91
Summary: Leave readers and writers out of the report.
Full description of issue:
Section 15.2 of the draft R6RS specifies reader and writer
objects, which represent arbitrary sources and sinks for
binary data.  These objects are not used anywhere else in
the report, do not appear to have been used in the field,
and well-known principles of software reuse would argue
for making them ports instead of a separate data type.
So long as they are a separate data type, however, they
could be specified by a SRFI and implemented by a portable
reference implementation.  It appears that no significant
efficiency would be lost by providing them via a portable
reference implementation, since the operations on file
readers and writers could just delegate to an encapsulated
binary port.
If they were ports, they might be useful.  Including them
in the R6RS as a separate data type might interfere with
making them ports in the R7RS.
[end of comment]