Cross platform serial library?

[Cameron Laird]

In article <14145.26380.455559.698878 at amarok.cnri.reston.va.us>,
Andrew M. Kuchling <akuchlin at cnri.reston.va.us> wrote:
>Richard Wall writes:
>>Anyway, looking through the lib docs, I am unable to find a serial
>>communications library that will work across platforms. Am I just looking in
>>the wrong place, or is this something python does not have. I would like it
>
>	I'm not aware of any cross-platform interface for serial
>comms, but it would be a very good idea to invent one.  Probably we
>should arrive at an interface, and then implement it for every
>different platform; on Windows it would use the sio module; I have a
>simple serial port class for Unix; I don't know how you'd do it on the
>MacOS, but Pythonmac probably has some support for serial I/O.
>
>	Here's an impromptu proposal:
>
>port = SerialPort( devicename, speed = 9600, stop_bits = 1, parity = 'N' )
>
>Create a serial port instance. 
>devicename is a string like '/dev/ttyS0' or 'COM1:'.
>speed is the baud rate, and is one of [300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 57600, ...]
>stop_bits: # of stop bits (0, 1, or 2)
>Parity: 'N' for none, 'O' for odd, (XXX isn't there a third mode?)
>
>Missing things: buffering mode (line-by-line, or character by
>character?)
>
>Serial ports should imitate file objects as much as possible, so
>they'll have .close(), .read(), .write(), .readline(), etc.  .tell()
>and .seek() would raise exceptions.
>
>I've only implemented the bits of serial I/O that I needed at the
>time, so I'm sure there are serial port capabilities missing from this
>interface.
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The Tcl <URL:http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/comp.lang.tcl/
tcl-examples.html#serial> and Perl <URL:http://language.perl.com/
newdocs/pod/perlfaq8.html#How_do_I_read_and_write_the_seri>
people have covered much of the same territory in this direction.
Both have half-abstracted serial communications; you can write
useful programs, but only if you know your operating system.

I'm optimistic that an effort to write a cross-platform library
would win support--maybe even workers!--from several camps, perhaps
including also PHP and Lua.  I don't think this would have happened
six months ago, but now more developers seem to understand that
syntax is secondary.
-- 

Cameron Laird           http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html
claird at NeoSoft.com      +1 281 996 8546 FAX