1. Euphoria, BGET, binary file routines
First of all, it's nice to see some actual Euphoria discussion taking place
here on the list. I realize this *nix stuff is important to some of you, but
it was really getting ridiculous for a while back there. Newcomers must have
been wondering if they were even on the right list!
Now, in BGET news, I have discovered that the benchmark program I included
was being grossly unfair to Ralf's EDOM routines. It turns out EDOM isn't
nearly as slow as my benchmark program made it look, so I apologize to Ralf
for that. I've also been optimizing BGET, making large and small changes to
make things even faster than they already were. The corrected benchmark
program and the speeded-up BGET stuff will be posted to the contributions
page as soon as they're ready (which may be a while...).
In future news, I'm working on a Euphoria library for reading and writing
structures from binary files. This will (finally!) allow Euphoria
programmers to work comfortably with the binary file storage methods used by
QBasic and Pascal (among many others).
constant FILE_STRUCT =
{B_SIGNED_INT16,
B_LENBYTE_STRING(11), -- 1 length, 10 chars
B_FLOAT32,
B_AREA(17) -- 17 bytes of filler
}
object x
x = get_struct(fn, FILE_STRUCT)
if sequence(x) then
-- x contains {int16, "string", float32, {17 bytes}}
end if
Routines will also be included for binary random-access methods:
fn = open_random("file.dat", "rb", FILE_STRUCT)
x = get_random(fn, 1) -- gets record 1 from the file
if sequence(x) then
if put_random(fn, 2, x) then -- write to record 2
puts(1, "Cannot write to record 2\n")
end if
end if
A lot of this is just in preliminary stages right now, so any feedback
(ideas, suggestions, stories of previous attempts to write the same thing,
etc.) would be greatly appreciated! As with BGET, I'm trying to keep things
consistent with existing Euphoria conventions, so it fits in as neatly as
possible with everything else.
This is all kind of funny -- I got into Euphoria to get *away* from all this
binary file mess! Now I find myself not only drawn back into binary file
handling, but actually writing libraries to drag Euphoria back into it as
well...
Be seeing you,
Gabriel Boehme
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Nothing worthwhile is achieved suddenly.
Robert Fripp
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