Channel

Basic (textual) I/O channel

Description:

The Channel class implements low-level input/output for the AST library. Writing an Object to a Channel will generate a textual representation of that Object, and reading from a Channel will create a new Object from its textual representation.

Normally, when you use a Channel, you should provide " source" and " sink" routines which connect it to an external data store by reading and writing the resulting text. By default, however, a Channel will read from standard input and write to standard output. Alternatively, a Channel can be told to read or write from specific text files using the SinkFile and SourceFile attributes, in which case no sink or source function need be supplied.

Constructor Function

AST_CHANNEL

Inheritance

The Channel class inherits from the Object class.

Attributes

In addition to those attributes common to all Objects, every Channel also has the following attributes:

Functions

In addition to those routines applicable to all Objects, the following routines may also be applied to all Channels: