Re: 'withfile' function implementation

[David Boyce]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 7:41 AM, Tim Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:
> would probably be quite nice and they don't absolutely demand that one
> use the C library mode flags (w,w+,a etc). This is one thing that
> Paul didn't like from the previous suggestions.

A bit of a sidetrack, but I don't agree with the logic here. The
notion that "r", "w", and "a" stand for "read", "write", and "append"
did not originate with the C stdio library. One could make a case
against these mnemonics on grounds of English-centrism but
realistically English is the lingua franca and GNU make ("patsubst",
"--keep-going") is already thoroughly Anglicized, for better or worse.
And "+" has a truly international mnemonic value.

So: I have no particular attitude about which implementation is
chosen, but being skeptical of [rwa+] simply because fopen borrowed
from the same dictionary makes no sense to me. People familiar with
fopen will enjoy the symmetry, others will still see the common sense
in it.

-David Boyce