Line disciplines (was Re: RFC 69 (v3) Standardize input record separator)

I think a more generic approach would be thinking of it as a series of
filters.  With the :attributes being hints to the open of what to push
on the filehandle.

This would allow dynamic additino and removal of the filters while the
filehandler were still active. The purely open approach would be
somewhat more static.

The issue would be speed. Adding lots of little pieces of code each of
which has bookkeeping overhead (its own plus the perl invocation
of the filter) would slow down perl's io famed text processing speed.

<chaim>


>>>>> "BCW" == Bryan C Warnock <[email protected]> writes:

BCW> standard line discipline syntax of :foo, or use something as simple as
BCW> a Perl hash, and would not necessarily be limited to the open call.
BCW> (This is all a wag, don't take it as gospel.)

BCW> So you'd potentially have hints like so:

BCW> :bin
BCW> :text
BCW> :text=ascii
BCW> :text=utf8
BCW> :text=utf32
BCW> :text=ebcdic
BCW> :text=some_weird_proprietary_format
BCW> :block=<size>
BCW> :line=
BCW> :line=dos
BCW> :line=mac
BCW> :line=unix
BCW> :line=/like, you know?/
BCW> :mod=chomp
BCW> :mod=split
BCW> :mod=\&do_some_funky_pre_processing

BCW> That would allow you to do stuff like the following.

BCW> open FOO, "foo_file", :text=ascii, :line=unix, :mod=chomp;
BCW> while (<FOO>)
BCW> {
BCW> 	# $_ = an ascii line, delimited to \n, but without the \n;
BCW> }

-- 
Chaim Frenkel					     Nonlinear Knowledge, Inc.
[email protected]				               +1-718-236-0183