Has anyone implemented their own port types?

[Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de>]

Jim Blandy writes:
 > 
 > In order to make it possible to mix reads and writes on socket ports
 > (see Christian Lynbech's bug), I would like to change the way the port
 > functions work (see scm_ptobfuns in ports.h).  This change makes the
 > port functions more versatile and consistent, but it will break all
 > existing port implementations.  The compiler will catch the error, and
 > the fix is small and simple.
 > 
 > Has anyone out there written C code that adds new port types to Guile?
 > This is probably the case iff your code calls scm_newptob.

A. Jaffer uses ptobs for the curses module of Scm scheme, for implementing
WINDOW objects. I didn't understand port objects at all back then, and they 
aren't sufficiently documented.
So I settled for normal smobs. Unfortunately it isn't possible to reconstruct
'window ports' as softports in scheme code, because the port closing routine
would produce a stray pointer when wrapped as subr, causing segfaults which
should be avoided in any case. So when a window port facility will be judged
to be useful by competent people, I'll try to add it after the change of the 
ptob code. Any opinions on that ? Let's hope that they get documented somehow
better than now ...
 

	Klaus Schilling