add an IO section to the tutorial

This commit is contained in:
Simon Cruanes 2016-02-24 22:35:24 +01:00
parent a2179d4355
commit 0e5334b673

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@ -166,6 +166,76 @@ val x : int = 2
----
== IO helpers
The core library contains a module called `CCIO` that provides useful
functions for reading and writing files. It provides functions that
make resource handling easy, following
the pattern `with_resource : resource -> (access -> 'a) -> 'a` where
the type `access` is a temporary handle to the resource (e.g.,
imagine `resource` is a file name and `access` a file descriptor).
Calling `with_resource r f` will access `r`, give the result to `f`,
compute the result of `f` and, whether `f` succeeds or raises an
error, it will free the resource.
Consider for instance:
[source,OCaml]
----
# CCIO.with_out "/tmp/foobar"
(fun out_channel ->
CCIO.write_lines_l out_channel ["hello"; "world"]);;
- : unit = ()
----
This just opened the file '/tmp/foobar', creating it if it didn't exist,
and wrote two lines in it. We did not have to close the file descriptor
because `with_out` took care of it. By the way, the type signatures are:
[source,OCaml]
----
val with_out :
?mode:int -> ?flags:open_flag list ->
string -> (out_channel -> 'a) -> 'a
val write_lines_l : out_channel -> string list -> unit
----
So we see the pattern for `with_out` (which opens a function in write
mode and gives its functional argument the corresponding file descriptor).
NOTE: you should never let the resource escape the
scope of the `with_resource` call, because it will not be valid outside.
OCaml's type system doesn't make it easy to forbid that so we rely
on convention here (it would be possible, but cumbersome, using
a record with an explicitely quantified function type).
Now we can read the file again:
[source,OCaml]
----
# let lines = CCIO.with_in "/tmp/foobar" CCIO.read_lines_l ;;
val lines : string list = ["hello"; "world"]
----
There are some other functions in `CCIO` that return _generators_
instead of lists. The type of generators in containers
is `type 'a gen = unit -> 'a option` (combinators can be
found in the opam library called "gen"). A generator is to be called
to obtain successive values, until it returns `None` (which means it
has been exhausted). In particular, python users might recognize
the function
[source,OCaml]
----
# CCIO.File.walk ;;
- : string -> walk_item gen = <fun>;;
----
where `type walk_item = [ `Dir | `File ] * string` is a path
paired with a flag distinguishing files from directories.
== To go further: containers.data
There is also a sub-library called `containers.data`, with lots of