Re: File open modes

[Norbert Nemec]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 06:50:53PM -0700, Quinn Dunkan wrote:
> Hmm, I didn't see Fergus' post either on the list or the newsgroup, so things
> must be getting munched somewhere.
> 
> Nobbi wrote:
> > Alternative aproach: Why not have different classes for the different 
> > open modes? That would be the only way that makes sense to me! (Of 
> > course you still have different modes for append and create, but that 
> > should be possible to handle!

You didn't reyct on this note, but I still think it is the best 
solution, as it circumvents all the discussion about open-modes and 
even saves the program a number of checks:

Have a INPUT_FILE, a OUTPUT_FILE and maybe a INOUT_FILE and anything 
else that is needed. Each has it's appropriate open methods and all the 
other methods appropriate for handling a file opened in that mode. 
After all, except for a small common subset, input and output is found 
in completely separate methods which could easily separated up.

As for the binary issue: The 1.3 library also has two distictive 
classes TEXT_FILE and BIN_FILE. Be aware, that, in unicode, a character 
need not be a byte! So you have a stream of CHARs and a stream of 
OCTETs. The first one also covers the \n conversion, but it does much 
more than that.

Ciao,
Nobbi

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