Why Strings as Classes?

[Robert Fraser]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Benji,
> 
> 
>> The new JSON parser in the Tango library operates on templated string
>> arrays. If I want to read from a file or a socket, I have to first
>> slurp the whole thing into a character array, even though the
>> character-streaming would be more practical.
>>
> 
> Unless you are only going to parse the start of the file or are going to 
> be throwing away most of it *while you parse it, not after* The best way 
> to parse a file is to load it all in one OS system call and then run a 
> slicing parser (like the Tango XML parser) on that.
> One memory allocation and one load or a mmap, and then only the meta 
> structures get allocated later.

There are cases where you might want to parse an XML file that won't fit 
easily in main memory. I think a stream processing SAX parser would be a 
good addition (perhaps not replacement for) the exiting one.