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000053_icon-group-sender _Mon Sep 13 15:39:31 1993.msg
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Received: from owl.CS.Arizona.EDU by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Mon, 13 Sep 1993 15:01:11 MST
Received: by owl.cs.arizona.edu; Mon, 13 Sep 1993 15:01:09 MST
Date: 13 Sep 93 15:39:31 GMT
From: agate!msuinfo!uchinews!kimbark!goer@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Organization: University of Chicago
Subject: Re: File Scanning revisited
Message-Id: <1993Sep13.153931.27591@midway.uchicago.edu>
References: <1993Sep13.141705.21611@rulway.LeidenUniv.nl>
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
ruiter@ruls41.LeidenUniv.nl (Jan-Peter de Ruiter) writes:
>
>1. Has the implementation of file scanning been discussed in Icon circles?
>2. Do other Icon programmers agree that file scanning is a "must"?
Yes and yes. We had a discussion about it a few months ago. Ken Walker
had some ideas. As I recall, the notion of file scanning has been con-
sidered a desideratum by the Icon Project itself for a good decade. I
doubt if it's high on the priority list at this point, though.
My own reason for liking the idea of file scanning is that I would not
have to use low-level I/O mechanisms like reads() to perform lexical analy-
sis. Right now, Icon has few advantages over C in this area, and many dis-
advantages. You can't use string scanning for lexical analysis unless you
don't mind restricting yourself to line-oriented file structures or are wil-
ling to read in huge chunks of a file as a single string. Other schemes
are doubtless possible, but file scanning is the obvious way of making the
lexing more amenable to Iconish processing.
I can't offer any implementation suggestions, I'm sorry to say, because I
no longer understand the implementation sufficiently well to do a decent
job of implementing file scanning. I fell behind after 8.0, and haven't
had the chance to catch up (I'm more concerned about publishing and doing
research in my own field just now...).
--
-Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer