[R6RS] Re: [R6RS-private] I/O library

[Marc Feeley]

> For the record, I seem to have some time on my hands this month, and
> intend to spend it on the design of an I/O library.  I don't think the
> I/O-related extensions of any Scheme system to be particularly good,
> and thus intend to do something new, probably based on the ideas in
> the SML basis.  (Reppy's book is finally out.)  As discussed
> generally, I intend to publish this as a SRFI as well, at least the
> part of it that makes sense in the context of R5RS.

Michael, before you spend too much time on this, I think you should
enlighten us on your general intentions and goals.  What issues are
you tackling and for what purpose?  Do you have specific solutions,
like those in Reppy's book, in mind?

>From our discussion at Snowbird I seem to remember that you were
concerned about synchronization problems, for example the ability to
wait for one of two ports to become readable.  If this is the main
concern of your I/O library design, I think it would be best to
discuss this in the context of threads, and this is only reasonable if
we start discussing threading models for Scheme (which sounds like a
huge issue beyond the scope of R6RS).

In the interest of maintaining focus, I think we should first tackle
some more down-to-earth I/O problems like character-encoding/decoding,
binary I/O and pathnames.  Synchronization is a rather orthogonal
issue that can be tackled later.

Marc