Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
1 point by waterhouse 5207 days ago | link | parent

The original spec says this...

  4. Read the second line "world" into an input string.
  5. Print the input string to the console.
Is an "input string" a variable? I guess it can't be much else... Ok. And I would put "prn.l" instead of "(prn l)"--not that it makes much difference, but I really like using ssyntax. Otherwise, I think I'm satisfied with this code.

And we've all written variations on this here, don't worry about calling it mine. It's a piece of code that we are collectively beating (or artfully crafting) into shape.



3 points by fallintothis 5206 days ago | link

Otherwise, I think I'm satisfied with this code.

Never fear! I'll show up to flog this horse in the nick of time! Y'know, before rigor mortis sets in.

Here's another I/O utility I think would be useful.

  (def readlines (n (o str (stdin)))
    (let line nil
      (repeat n (= line (readline str)))
      line))
It undoubtedly sets a variable (just not a global), though I think the "challenger" phrased the requirement as such because of a C-centric view: allocate a chunk of memory for the string, then read the string into there (which, technically, even a simple (readline) does). Anyway... With all of these, the Arc code would look something like

  (tofile   "fileio.txt" (prn "hello"))
  (ontofile "fileio.txt" (prn "world"))
  (fromfile "fileio.txt" (prn (readlines 2)))
And I don't think I could squeeze more out of that without getting overly specific. Of course, readlines is a conventional name for something that just reads all the lines of a stream, but I think we could reasonably use names closer to Arc's allchars and filechars.

  (def all-lines ((o str (stdin)))
    (drain (readline str)))

  (def filelines (name)
    (fromfile name (all-lines)))
Not sure if the latter should be hyphenated, though.

-----