4.6.4 Soft Ports

A soft-port is a port based on a vector of procedures capable of accepting or delivering characters. It allows emulation of I/O ports.

Function: make-soft-port vector modes

Returns a port capable of receiving or delivering characters as specified by the modes string (see open-file). vector must be a vector of length 5. Its components are as follows:

0. procedure accepting one character for output
1. procedure accepting a string for output
2. thunk for flushing output
3. thunk for getting one character
4. thunk for closing port (not by garbage collection)

For an output-only port only elements 0, 1, 2, and 4 need be procedures. For an input-only port only elements 3 and 4 need be procedures. Thunks 2 and 4 can instead be #f if there is no useful operation for them to perform.

If thunk 3 returns #f or an eof-object (see eof-object? in Revised(5) Scheme) it indicates that the port has reached end-of-file. For example:

If it is necessary to explicitly close the port when it is garbage collected, (see add-finalizer).

(define stdout (current-output-port))
(define p (make-soft-port
           (vector
            (lambda (c) (write c stdout))
            (lambda (s) (display s stdout))
            (lambda () (display "." stdout))
            (lambda () (char-upcase (read-char)))
            (lambda () (display "@" stdout)))
           "rw"))

(write p p) ⇒ #<input-output-soft#\space45d10#\>