PostScript - Foreign Function Interface

[ne...@zzo38computer.org.invalid]

One thing lacking in PostScript is good foreign function interface. There
is %pipe% (specific to Ghostscript, but I had made a list of my own ideas
of a new version of PostScript, and this is one of them), but the pipe is
only one direction of data at a time; it is not two way pipe.

There is printobject/writeobject (reading this format can be implemented
in a not too long C code, which I had posted to this newsgroup before),
although it has some limitations.

--
Don't laugh at the moon when it is day time in France.

[John Reiser]

> One thing lacking in PostScript is good foreign function interface. There
> is %pipe% (specific to Ghostscript, but I had made a list of my own ideas
> of a new version of PostScript, and this is one of them), but the pipe is
> only one direction of data at a time; it is not two way pipe.

Much of the functionality of a two-way pipe can be implemented
on any OS that provides named pipes. Use an anonymous %pipe%
for the output from PostScript into the input of the external pipeline,
and write the output of the pipeline into a named pipe that is
consumed by open+read.