> I am currently trying to rewrite the Graphics.Pgm library from hackage > to parse the PGM to a lazy array.
Laziness and IO really do not mix. > The problem is that even using a lazy array structure, because the > parser returns an Either structure it is only possible to know if the > parser was successful or not after the whole file is read, That is one of the problems. Unexpected memory blowups could be another problem. The drawbacks of lazy IO are well documented by now. > The behaviour I want to achieve is like this: I want the program when > compiled to read from a file, parsing the PGM and at the same time > apply transformations to the entries as they are read and write them > back to another PGM file. Such problems are the main motivation for iteratees, conduits, pipes, etc. Every such library contains procedures for doing exactly what you want. Please check Hackage. John Lato's iteratee library, for example, has procedure for handling sound (AIFF) files -- which may be very big. IterateeM has the TIFF decoder -- which is incremental and strict. TIFF is much harder to parse than PGM. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
