On Wednesday 04 April 2018 04:06 PM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
IIRC, someone said it is implemented as 'remaining size being zero'
and some virtual unix files like /dev/random are zero sized.
Currently, for files other than sdio (stdout, stderr, stdin) it is
effectively defined as:
atEnd := stream position >= stream size
I see a confusion between Stream and its underlying collection. Stream
is an iterator and just does next, nextPut, peek, reset etc. But methods
like size or atEnd depend on its collection and there is no guarantee
that this collection has a known and finite size.
Essentially, a collection's size may be known and finite, unknown but
finite size or infinite. This has nothing do with file descriptor being
std{in,out,err}. If std* is a regular file or special file like
/dev/mem, /dev/null, it's size is known at open time. With console
streams or sysfs files, size is unknown until EOT (^D) or NUL is
received. Lastly, special files like /dev/zero, /dev/random or
/proc/cpuinfo don't have a finite size but report it as zero (!).
[ stream atEnd ] whileFalse: [ stream next. .. ]
will only terminate if its collection size is finite. It won't terminate
for infinite collections.
Regards .. Subbu
