Without getting into a general debate about the new stream classes, a stream class meant for writing to a file SHOULDN'T have #contents in its interface. (1) For example, if you open a channel for *output* in Unix, you have no reason to expect that you have been granted a right to read it. For example, suppose user=fred group=whizzy owns a file foo.grace with permission bits rw--w---- and you are running a program as user=mary group=whizzy. You can open foo.grace for writing, but you cannot read it. (2) The thing you open might not be a file. It might be, for example, a symbolic link to /dev/null, a symbolic link to /dev/tty, a named pipe, or even (in principle, I don't know if anyone has done it, but with something like FUSE it *could* be done) a socket to a remote machine. In all these cases, *nobody* is storing the contents. (3) If the thing you open *is* a disc file, and you *do* have permission to read it back, what should happen if you have written more to the file than your memory can hold? If you know that the output written to the stream is going to be small enough that holding it in memory won't be a problem, could you use a WriteStream and then write it to the output file in one burst when it's finished? Now, what about #ensureASpace? It can *almost* be done on a buffered stream by looking at the last character in the buffer and adding a space if it isn't one. But what if you called #flush and the buffer is empty? Well, in that case, if you have a "monolithic" design where the stream records the last character at every flush, it's still doable. If you don't have a monolithic design, you have to be able to read the last block before the present one, and we've just seen why that is not in general possible. The one thing you can safely do is to say that if the buffer is empty you will add a space just to be sure, so that the contract for #ensureASpace becomes Ensures that the past contents of the receiver ends with a space. Tries to avoid adding a space when there is already one, but may or may not succeed. On 1 August 2018 at 10:34, Andrew P. Black <apblack@pdx.edu> wrote:

I’m making a stream to write on a file using

outputFile := FileLocator home / 'Desktop' / classBeingTranslated name , '.grace'. outputFile writeStreamDo: [ :s | ... ]

Is that OK? When I do the above, in the writeStreamDo: block, s is bound to an instance of ZnCharacterWriteStream. But that class does nt understand many methods from WriteStream. For example, #contents is not understood, and nor is #ensureASpace.

To put things another way: I wrote tests using a stream created with String streamContents: [ :s | ... ], and everything worked fine. Then, for production use, I switch to a stream created using outputFile writeStreamDo: [ :s | ... ] and everything breaks.

I know that ZnCharacterWriteStream is fairly new. Am I doing something wrong, or is ZnCharacterWriteStream still under development?

Andrew