stdio buffering considered harmful

[Henry Spencer]

At one point, I believe the folks at Duke implemented an alternative
to normal stdio buffering:  all characters supplied by a single (e.g.)
printf call went out as a single write, but there was no buffering
across calls.  They did this mostly to get the performance of big
writes to ttys without the complexities of trying to guess when to
flush the buffers, but they claimed that it bought most of the speed
of full buffering without the annoyances.  I don't believe they did
this on pipes, but it might be worth considering.  Any notions how
much of a performance penalty it would involve?
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry