Re: "interact" behaves oddly if used interactively

John Meacham wrote:

personally, I think the easiest solution would be to punt the whole issue by having:

getContents lazily read the file if it is mmapable or a pipe

eagerly slurp the whole file if it refers to a tty

I think this kind of irregular behaviour would make the IO functions even more difficult to understand. Why should some invokations of the same program exhibit utterly different space/time behaviour from others?! mycomputer% ./myprogram mycomputer% cat | ./myprogram mycomputer% ./myprogram

of course this makes 'interact' not really interactive,

Exactly, it defeats the whole purpose of the interact function (to provide support for Landin-stream IO), so you might just as well remove it completely... -- Thomas H