On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 02:42, Alastair Reid wrote:
How different is this from the idea of open a file in binary mode and in text mode? I know that Hugs distinguishes the two because I remember the case that triggered the requirement: generating MIDI files on Win32.
I guess what I'm saying is do we need new read/write operations or just new open operations?
Do we really want different open modes with respect to how the data in the file is presented to us? I think the whole idea about text/binary mode is wrong. Reading and interpretation of the data in a file are two entirely different operations, so sticking one (!) aspect of interpretation so deeply into the interface for _reading_ a file scatters the task of interpreting the file and results in confusion. Sven Moritz