Opening and closing files.

["Aubrey Jaffer" <jaffer@martigny.ai.mit.edu>]

   I think that the right solution here, regardless of whether or not
   the Scheme I/O system grows out of its `toy' status, ...

I don't think that opening and closing of files can grow out of the
"toy" department without being replaced.  This is from an article I
posted to comp.lang.scheme:

I have really had it with the NO TOKENS rule in scheme.  Scm3c has:

input-port?		output-port?
open-input-file		open-output-file	open-io-file
call-with-input-file	call-with-output-file
close-input-port	close-output-port

open-input-pipe		open-output-pipe
close-pipe

If I were to fill out this chart with the obvious procedures I would
have 18 functions just for opening and closing files.  I have not
created these out of idleness; I actually use them and the Scheme set
is not sufficient for my work.  I want to add unbuffered versions as
well (open vs. fopen) which will result in a grand total of 36.  Oh, I
almost forgot, on MSDOS machines (one of the platforms that scm3c runs
on) there is a difference between binary and text files.  That will
bring it up to 72 PROCEDURES JUST FOR OPENING AND CLOSING FILES.

This situation is obviously untenable...