From: John Feezell <JohnFeezell@3wplace.com>
Date: 2004-07-21T21:50:06+09:00
Subject: Re: sysread and buffered I/O

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:56:01 +0900, Tanaka Akira <akr@m17n.org> wrote:

> In article <189-1205065002.20040721185353@soyabean.com.au>,
>   Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> writes:
>
>> Tanaka, can you please give a brief description of the method (assume
>> I know nothing about advanced I/O), and I'll suggest a name.  Of
>> course, other people will too.
>
> [ruby-dev:23247] contains a patch including RDoc comment in English.
>
>  /*
>   *  call-seq:
>   *     ios.readpartial(integer [, buffer])    => string, buffer, or nil
>   *
>   *  Reads at most <i>integer</i> bytes from the I/O stream but
>   *  it blocks only if <em>ios</em> has no data immediately available.
>   *  If the optional <i>buffer</i> argument is present,
>   *  it must reference a String, which will receive the data.
>   *  It raises <code>EOFError</code> on end of file.
>   *
>   *     STDIN.readpartial(4096)   #=> "Data immediately available"
>   */
>
> (The behavior on EOF is modified.)

Here are some other possible names that seems to fit with readchar,  
readline,
and readlines and yet catch the idea of "readpartial."

readportion
readparcel
readbundle
readatmost

Personally, "readatmost" would fit closes in my mind to the above  
description.