Christian M. Cepel wrote: > I had envisioned the parser working with a controlling program thus... > > o Program is responsible for helping the user to navigate the > filesystem (including url locations) to locate the file to be parsed. > > This creates two scenarios. > 1. In the case of a local file, the file is locked for access. File > reference is passed to the parser. > 2. In the case of a non local file, or an 'unsaved' buffer in the > program, a file reference is not appropriate. > > <Discussion snipped>
IMHO, memory is cheap, most every OS in wide use today supports some kind of virtual memory, and abc files are, in general, relatively miniscule. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the data structure returned by the parser is significantly larger in memory use than the text fed into it. So I would recommend you avoid the file reference entirely and work only on a passed in memory buffer. You don't have to worry about it changing under you, or any file idiosyncrasies of the underlying system, and it will simplify your code quite a bit. The only environment where I see a potential issue with doing it that way might be a PDA trying to handle a Huge ABC collection file. But were I coding a parent program for such a beast, I'd write a brute force pre-parser to split the collection into individual tunes which get fed to the parser individually anyway. So again, the parser shouldn't have to worry about memory use. -->Steve Bennett To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
