[Haskell-cafe] Re: Handles with their IOMode in their type

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Dec 9, 2009, at 16:51 , Bas van Dijk wrote:
> I will change the types to:
>
> stdin :: Handle ReadMode
> stdout :: Handle WriteMode
> stderr :: Handle WriteMode
>
> Or are there scenarios where people want to write to stdin or read
> from stdout or stderr?


These situations *do* come up; the controlling terminal for a program  
is open read/write on all 3 file descriptors initially, ands programs  
like more/less/pg rely on this and do their I/O on stdout.   
Additionally, on *BSD pipes are actually socketpairs and therefore  
bidirectional, and a small number of programs rely on this.

But I would not do that by default, just expose a way for programs to  
make it so if they wish.

(Hm, just discovered that the System.Posix.IO wrapper for fcntl() does  
*not* expose the part of the result of F_GETFL that reports the open  
mode.  Boo hiss.)

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


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