Binary operations on current-{input,output}-port

[Göran Weinholt]

Hello schemers,

I noticed something in R7RS that I find puzzling.

The current input and output ports are textual ports, at least
initially:

| (current-input-port) procedure
| (current-output-port) procedure
| (current-error-port) procedure
| Returns the current default input port, output port, or error port (an
| output port), respectively. […] The initial bindings for these are
| implementation-defined textual ports.

And it is used by default in several of the input procedures:

| 6.13.2. Input
| If port is omitted from any input procedure, it defaults to the value
| returned by (current-input-port). […]

However, this *textual* port is also used for the *binary* input
procedures:

| (read-u8) procedure
| (read-u8 port) procedure
| Returns the next byte available from the binary input port, updating
| the port to point to the following byte. If no more bytes are
| available, an end-of-file object is returned.

Note the (read-u8) entry, which will default to using
(current-input-port) according to the text in 6.13.2.

The entries for (peek-u8), (u8-ready?), (read-bytevector k) and
(read-bytevector! bytevector) are similar.

On the output side there are (write-u8 byte) and (write-bytevector
bytevector), which similarly use (current-output-port).

Is there some specified behavior I'm missing? It seems to me that
(read-u8) etc are straight up errors.

--
Göran Weinholt | https://weinholt.se/
Debian Developer | 73 de SA6CJK

[John Cowan]

The point is that current-*-port is a parameter you can rebind, and you would probably do so if you were doing a lot of binary I/O.  They are initially bound to std* and assumed to be character ports because backward compatibility.

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[Göran Weinholt]

Hello John,

What you describe is a plausible scenario where the specified
semantics work. But a program would have to be careful to not
accidentally use them as text ports during such a rebinding, which
would be an error.

I'm not convinced that it's a useful footgun to have in a standard,
but that is probably due to my personal preferences more than anything
else, so I will not push to change this.

Thanks for the clarification!

/Göran

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 03:25:27PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> The point is that current-*-port is a parameter you can rebind, and you
> would probably do so if you were doing a lot of binary I/O.  They are
> initially bound to std* and assumed to be character ports because backward
> compatibility.

> On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 11:35 AM Göran Weinholt <[1]go...@weinholt.se>

> Göran Weinholt   | [2]https://weinholt.se/

> Debian Developer | 73 de SA6CJK
>
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