Re: [Query] Tree-based parsing?

Be careful -- if you're editing in something like MS Word (not me, mind
you, but someone might...) you don't have much memory left for the
compile...


I tend to agree overall, though. We're nearly to the point that memory
and disk space are cheap enough that we can assume we don't have to
worry. Not quite there yet -- many people still have older machines
that have more severe limitations.


(caveat -- I don't endorse using memory without thought though -- there
are still many ways to improve performance just by being careful
programmers. Not to mention things are more easily maintained...)


-- Scott


Nick Kramer wrote:
>
> Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> wrote:
> [discussing unusual parsing strategies]
> [scheme to save memory by parsing a chunk at a time]
>
> I'm tempted to say that in today's world, such optimizations are
> unnecessary. I've worked with two parsers that read the entire source
> file into memory before they process it, and I haven't seen any
> problems. After all, a 10,000 line file only takes up about 350KB on
> disk, and I'd consider a file that big to be rather unwieldy for the
> programmer. Granted, since you're storing multiple representations in
> memory, your memory usage will be more, but still quite reasonable
> (say, a few megabytes). On a 32- or 64-megabyte machine, is it really
> worth doing anything else?
--
Scott Stanchfield
MetaWare Incorporated
Santa Cruz, CA
--

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