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Re: CLIM philosophy wrt to X.

    Date: Mon, 26 Aug 91 11:28:57 -0400
    From: kanderso@BBN.COM

      Date: Mon, 26 Aug 91 09:45 EDT
      From: "David C. P. Linden" <DCPL@fuji.ila.com>
      Subject: CLIM philosophy wrt to X.
      To: chee@isi.edu, clim@BBN.COM

    I don't think a macro would be a good idea because:

    1.  it would require low level routines to check if they should buffer or
	not, and they are already slow enough.

The check cost could be as low the cost of a SLOT-VALUE operation.
Optimized implementations might manage to put this inline with the
output methods instead of defining :AFTER methods (which would introduce
more slowness).

    2.  if the macro was implemented as a closure, this would cons in those
	Common LISP's that still don't stack allocate closures.

I think with-buffered-output is intended to be a sufficiently high level
macro that it is executed infrequently enough compared to the rest of
the program that consing a closure is relatively insignificant.

    3.  Usually i don't want lots of operations unbufferred, i just want to be
	sure  the  buffer is flushed by a particular time.

and that's what force-output is for.

I think the original question was "What is CLIM's stance/convention on
getting output forced to the target, especially for interactive
streams?"  X apparently requires programs to use a force-output
mechanism.  Genera's DW doesn't.  I know from hard experience that many
a Genera network program of mine didn't work initially because network
streams are buffered and I forgot to do a FORCE-OUTPUT.  If I may
suggest some words into your (kanderson's) mouth, it sounds like you are
saying "I'd rather not get in the habit of depending on some streams
being auto-force-output, or even being tempted by having the option to
enable auto-force-output.  I'm content with sprinking calls to
FORCE-OUTPUT in places I deem appropriate."  Is that a fair statement?
It is reasonable and certainly safe across all HW&SW platforms that I
can imagine.

    I'd rather just put FORCE-OUTPUT's where i know i really want the output
    buffer emptied.  I don't mind this being a noop on streams that don't
    buffer.

    It would be reasonable for CLIM to put FORCE-OUTPUT's in some obvious
    places like the loop inside TRACKING-POINTER, but i also think it is
    reasonable to expect a developer to add others too.

General (beyond Lisp and CLIM) philosophy: There is one
auto-force-output scenario I think all bidirection streams should adher
to, and that is: "Doing a <read> operation with an empty read buffer
should do a FORCE-OUTPUT."

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