Re: 'with pixels' (was Re: Engines are started; ...)

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Saturday 10 July 2004 01:21 am, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> >
> >Daniel - don't you think it would be cleaner to provide an entirely
> >separate routine, df_readbinary(), and call it instead of df_readline()
> >when needed?
>
> That is correct, and I sort of started out that way.  However, the more
> I thought about it, it just seemed that the formatted and binary input
> really weren't too much different.  One can still imagine data inside a
> binary file as being in columns, with implicit columns filled in by the
> line number, etc.; just like with the formatted I/O.  

For what it's worth -
After I apply the with-image patch df_readline contains 653 lines of
code, of which only 303 are shared by the two modes.  

The largest block of shared code is the section (lines 3362-3465)
checking for blank lines, skipped lines, and EOF.  Is this even relevant
to binary mode? 

> And at the bottom
> of df_readline() is the important code which knows how and where to put
> data in the v[] variables

Yes, that is clearly important to both modes.  But perhaps it should be
split out into a common subroutine shared by two different input routines.

At that point you might even find that 2 input stages + 1 shared output
stage have fewer lines of code jointly than the current single routine with 
its tangle of #ifdefs.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Department of Biochemistry & Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle