[usocket-devel] Portably supporting :external-format

[nick thomas]

On 10/22/06, Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Looking at ABCL and flexi-streams though, I do see a problem: ABCL
> doesn't have a generic function close, but defines STREAM-CLOSE
> instead... At least flexi-streams 0.5.10 seems to depend on close,
> open-stream-p and maybe others too, to be generic functions, not just
> defuns...
>
> Well, ABCL isn't in wide use anyway and not going very fast
> development, but, well, I could ask around with the developers what to
> expect there. It would indeed be too bad not to be able to support
> :external-format there, but that's an option too (just ignore the
> external-format in case of ABCL). We need to make sure to document
> that though.
>
That sounds good to me.

One minor concern, though: does it make sense to add a whole new
mandatory dependency (two, in fact) for a relatively obscure feature
like this? Now, I realize I'm backpedaling here, but how about we
require the user, if they want to use flexi-streams, to just create
one themselves from the raw streams that we return? This is a
trade-off: it makes things easier for people who don't need
:external-format or bivalent streams, but it makes things harder for
people who do. It would also mean that the :external-format flag to
OPEN-STREAM would remain useless, but, in trivial-sockets itself, it
only works under CLISP, anyway.

Anyway, feel free to ignore me; your way would work fine, as well. I'm
just throwing out alternatives here.