From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2005-08-29T17:16:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Rio 0.3.3

"rio4ruby" <rio4ruby@rubyforge.org> wrote in message 
news:1125271272.418117.195830@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Dave Burt wrote:
>> I was going to ask for rio("cmdio:foo") and friends
>> rio("stdin:") etc., but I tried it and it works... just needs to be
>> documented in INTRO.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> It would also be nice to have a more reader-friendly way to create Rios 
>> of
>> these different types. You could accept a Symbol as the first argument:
>> rio(:fd, 2)
>> rio(:string, my_string)
>> rio(:stdin)
>> rio(:stdio)
>> rio(:cmdio, "sort")
>>
> You're a damn genius, aren't you :)
>
> The reason 'stdin:', 'stdout:", etc. are not documented, is that
> they are not currently part of the published interface. I also
> noticed that if you move the colon to the begining and removed
> the quotes, you have a symbol. I have not decided whether to have
> the string form, the symbol form or both be part of the
> documented interface.
>
> The string form is not actually an alternative syntax.
> It is core to Rio.
> rio(?-)
> is immediatly converted to
> rio('stdio:')
>
> Internally all resources are converted to a URL-like syntax,
> a IORL if you like. The fully qualified IORL for stderr is
> rio:stderr:
> Rio, of course, assumes the 'rio:' part, if missing.
>
> You may have noticed also, that if you drop the 'r', you have
> io:stderr:
> A readable, language neutral, way of addressing I/O within a
> program. Similar to localhost in a URL, io:stdin: always refers
> to stdin of the current process.
>
> My ideas in this area are not fully hashed out -- hence the
> lack of documentation.
>
> Cheers,
> -Christopher
>