Re: Output buffering

[William Clinger <will@skinner.cs.uoregon.edu>]

    It must be admitted that terminal output buffering is not critical on a 10
    MIPS (not even the current state of the art) single-user workstation the way
    it was on the PDP 11/45 of Unix's ancestry.  I think the standard wisdom on
    this issue is becoming outdated.

I want to put in a word for low-end personal computers, where the CPU
running Scheme is also responsible for updating the display.  Updating a
window on a Macintosh is substantially more expensive than sending a
character to a terminal on a typical Unix system.  Updating a color
display is noticeably slower than updating a monochrome display.  This
matters enough that many people use color monitors as monochrome displays.

I assume the situation is similar with Microsoft Windows.  Even low-end
Unix machines running X windows face this problem.

In MacScheme, the NEWLINE, DISPLAY, and WRITE procedures flush output to
the screen (but not to files).  The WRITE-CHAR procedure does not.  Many
people coming to the Macintosh from the IBM and Unix worlds have complained
about the buffering of interactive character input, but there have been few
complaints about the buffering of character output since we adopted this
solution.

Will