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PerlIO and filters
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From:
Benjamin Stuhl
Date:
November 21, 1999 13:43
Subject:
PerlIO and filters
Message ID:
19991121214310.6189.qmail@hotmail.com
I have had some time this weekend to muse on the possibility of writing a
true PerlIO, rather than simply sitting on top of whatever stdio
implementation people have. I have come up with three main goals for any
implementation:
1. Lightweight - the perl distribution is all ready quite big, and
doesn't really have 1.5MB free for a heavyduty IO system
2. Speed - it doesn't have to be the world's fastest, but it needs
to be reasonably good
3. Filters - the best justification I have thought of for writing
our own IO system is to provide coherent, simple IO filtering.
Unfortunantely, this is the hardest part, and also leads to some
tricky questions of what call should do what (ex: how much
physical IO is needed to get one character out at the end of the
filters, especially with filters that produce varying amounts for
a given input (cf. UTF-8, compression, etc.)? Should
PerlIO_read() read filtered or unfiltered chars? What do we do if
it is impossible to give a number of chars that matches the
length given? and so on).
Any thoughts?
-- BKS
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PerlIO and filters
by Benjamin Stuhl