Re: [Scheme-reports] display should not guarantee termination

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x>]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Per Bothner <per@x> wrote:

On 11/23/2012 12:52 AM, Alex Shinn wrote:

I still find this a surprising concept.  Do you have programs
which currently produce infinite unbounded output intentionally?

Any daemon or server written in a pure functional (lazy) style.

Likewise any Unix-style transducer (pipe) hooked up to unbounded input.

Such a program might have a pure lazy part that produces as a
result a lazy string or list.  Then a small driver part interacts
with the world - and the simplest to do that is to just display
or write[-simple] the result,

I think it's safe to say lazy strings are outside the scope

of R7RS.  I was curious about lazy lists - since the list is

not complete until the closing parenthesis (which will never

come) it's generally impossible to actually use the output.

So if you want to implement the Unix yes(1), you can

just write (do () (#f) (display "yes\n")), or if you have lazy

strings you can take a more round-about approach of

(display (make-lazy-string-of-repeated-yes)).  But the

display of a list is unspecified to begin with and doesn't

seem useful.

-- 

Alex

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