Why Strings as Classes?

[BCS]

Reply to Robert,

> 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.
> 

If you can't fit the data file in memory the I find it hard to believe you 
will be able to hold the parsed file in memory. If you can program the parser 
to dump unneeded data on the fly or process and discard the data, that might 
make a difference.