Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Re: Abstract IO

[Nicolas C. <war...@fr...>]

[...]
> > Other case : if you have a file containing N strings of X characters
> > separated by \0 , then reading 3 strings will give you a position of
> > 3*(X+1) - including the \0 separator. It's difficult to add a concept of
> > "length" and "pos" on such tokens , although it's very easy to do in the
> > case ('a,'a list) input.
>
> So in this example you have an object of type
> (string, string list) input. Physically, the different strings are
> stored in a file separated by \0. But for the abstract interface this
> is irrelevant. In your example, if you read 3 strings then pos should
> return 3, /not/ the sum of the lengths of the individual strings, and if
> you do a "seek in 14" then the implementation should go to the start
> of the 15th string in the file.

I agree with that, this is the correct behavior for a (string,string list)
input, but what about a (char,string) input ? pos/seek should be expressed
in the smallest unit of the two parameters ( char ). And here it's getting
confusing because the \0 string separator is also a char.

Nicolas Cannasse