Re: [PATCH] Improved string writing

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Kevin Ryde <address@hidden> writes:

> What happened to the port buffering?

Indeed, it occurred to me that this is easily fixed by making the port
line-buffered with `setvbuf'...

Actually, I hadn't considered using it because `stdout' is line-buffered
by default, at least on GNU/Linux (SUSv2 states that it shall be
"fully-buffered" by default [1, 2]).  But it looks like Guile's file
ports are unbuffered by default.  Maybe _this_ should be changed?

> That doesn't sound like a good place.

Well, this is not user-visible buffering, just an internal optimization.
It looks better to call `scm_lfwrite ()' once than `scm_putc ()' for
each character, especially since `scm_putc ()' calls `scm_lfwrite ()'
which in turn calls the write method of this port's type, etc.  So, IMO,
this change may still be valuable.

> For the fixed parts of the format string it probably does that to keep
> track of the output column, something it should let the port do.

`scm_lfwrite ()' does this so Guile code doesn't have to care about it.

Thanks,
Ludovic.

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/stderr.html
[2] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/stdio.html