most speakers of modern English don't think of "spew" as a synonym for "vomit".

I cannot speak for most, but whenever I (as a native American English speaker) read that word, my mental voice is Skippy Squirrel, and it definitely has the "vomit" connotation for me; in fact, for me, every other usage of spew derives from the "vomit": a volcano spews forth lava because it's similar to the way that a human spews forth vomit, or an idiot spews forth nonsense because it's analogous to the way that a sick child spews out breakfast. If you don't have vomit as your default definition for spew, you're lucky, IMO, because it prevents some nasty mental images when people use "spew" for the other variants.

In German "speien" can also mean spitting out or with big force (like spitting out disgusting food or spitting with disgust onto s.o. face)

I suppose it's not much different in English.

As I already said, this might be accurate for writing a whole file at once, I don't see how "slurping" (which is actually a Dutch/German loan word) reflects "gulping" a whole file.

It's a perfectly cromulent usage going back to the ancients: slurp

Clojure uses the pair spit and slurp, coincidentally.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

You do realize that English diverged from German like a thousand years ago, right?

Sure, I remember it like it was yesterday.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}