Why Strings as Classes?

[Benji Smith]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Benji,
>> Well, for something like a DOM parser, it's pretty much impossible to
>> parse a file that won't fit into memory. But a SAX parser doesn't
>> actually create any objects. It just calls events, while processing
>> XML data from a stream. A good SAX parser can operate without ever
>> allocating anything on the heap, leaving the consumer to create any
>> necessary objects from the parse process.
>>
>> --benji
>>
> 
> Interesting, I've worked with parsers* that function something like that 
> but never thought of them in that way. OTOH I can think of only very 
> limited domain where this would be useful. If I needed to process that 
> much data I'd load it into a database and go from there.
> 
> *In fact my parser generator could be used that way.

In fact, that's one of the places where I've used this kind of parsing 
technique before.

I wrote a streaming CSV parser (which takes discipline to do correctly, 
since a double-quote enclosed field can legally contain arbitrary 
newline characters, and quotes are escaped by doubling). It provides a 
field callback and a record callback, so it's very handy for performing 
ETL tasks.

If I had to load the whole CSV files into memory before parsing, it 
wouldn't work, because sometimes they can be hundreds of megabytes. But 
the streaming parser takes up almost no memory at all.

--benji