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1 point by waterhouse 5205 days ago | link | parent

Cool, I have been attributed! :-) I feel I have to make another embarrassing nitpick, though, which is that we want the second line, rather than the second s-expression (they happen to be the same here, but the task is to demonstrate how to do these things). I would therefore go for one of these as the third piece of code:

  (w/infile f "fileio.txt"
    (pr:cadr:lines:allchars f))

  ; Or, though this doesn't close the input port:
  (pr:cadr:lines:allchars:infile "fileio.txt")

  ; Both of the above, though fun, will read all characters
  ;  in the file, only to return the second line. Better:
  (w/infile f "fileio.txt"
    readline.f
    (prn readline.f))


1 point by evanrmurphy 5205 days ago | link

How about this variation of your latest:

  (w/infile f "fileio.txt"
    (repeat 2 (= l readline.f))
    (prn l))
While a bit longer, it eliminates the duplication of readline.f and addresses the concern about not reading "world" into a variable.

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1 point by waterhouse 5205 days ago | link

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.

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3 points by fallintothis 5204 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.

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