Re: request for review: Doing direct file I/O in Emacs Lisp

[Stefan Monnier]

>> >> The two don't have to be competing.  Instead I expect they'd be
>> >> used together (by extending your proposal to allow a file-handle
>> >> as "output port").
>> > There is not much of an incentive to have explicit file handles if
>> > you can establish all of the necessary redirections without them.
>> 
>> Piping the output of one process to the input of another, maybe?

> Academical right now.  You know the complicated procedure of pipe(2),
> fork, selective closes and/or dup2 calls needed to properly create a
> working pipeline?  I am afraid that "file-handle" does not buy us
> that at all.

Obviously, John's code won't give us pipes for free.
But without both file handles and your suggested changes, I don't see how
we'll ever get eshell to fully support pipes.  I.e. it's not sufficient but
it's necessary.


        Stefan