Text I/O library proposal, first draft

[John Meacham]

presumably if you are doing random access on the file, it is in a known
nonarbitrary text encoding (like utf8). in which case you can
read/access the file with the binary routines and just use the
appropriate text conversions to get data out. 
        John

On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 03:55:44PM -0700, Hal Daume wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> 
> > Bad things:
> > 
> >   * There's no way to implement fgetpos/fsetpos type functionality,
> >     because coders don't expose their internal state. (In fact, there
> >     would need to be a way to explicitly copy the state, since it may
> >     well include IORefs, Ptrs, etc.) Is this a serious problem?
> 
> Yes!  This is an enormously serious problem.  At least for me.
> 
> It's not a problem for writing files, but I really really really need
> this functionality when reading files.  Reason: I'm often tooling around
> in very large (1gb or greater) files which happen to be sorted on some
> sort of index and I need to do binary search in them.  To load all the
> file into Haskell or to do linear search is impossible.
> 
> Other than that, I rather like the design.
> 
>  - Hal
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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net
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