Fwd: FileSystem and references to FIle

From: Reg Krock <[hidden email]>

Subject: FileSystem and references to FIle

Date: 8 January, 2019 at 2:05:15 PM EST

To: Guillermo Polito <[hidden email]>, Sven Van Caekenberghe <[hidden email]>

Cc: Dale Henrichs <[hidden email]>, Martin McClure <[hidden email]>

Guille,

As I have been working on porting FileStream to Gemstone, I have found that AbstractBinaryStream could be made more generic if the references to File were handled slightly differently. The idea is to delegate the call of File in AbstractBinaryStream to the instance side of File.

For example:
AbstractBinaryFIleStream >>#flush
File flush: handle

would be implemented as follows:

AbstractBinaryFIleStream >>#flush
file flush: handle

File>>#flush: aHandle
self class flush: aHandle

From a compatibility perspective, GemStone would then also implement a GsFile>>#flush: and handle the flush as appropriate for GemStone.

I have looked at the VA Smalltalk code as well and this would also work well with their code base.

The methods that would need to be changed are:
1) AbstractBinaryFileStream
atEnd
flush
next:intoBuffer:
next:putAll:
position
position:
readInto:startingAt:
size
sync
2) BinaryFileStream
close
closed
truncate:
2) StdioStream
next:

Other references to File in the FileSystem classes, could the be changed to a FileSystem fileClass which would return the file class for the variation of Smalltalk.
Pharo would return File, GemStone would return GsFile, VA Smalltalk would return CfsFileDescriptor.

Your thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Reg