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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
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Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:56:31 +0100
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On 27 Feb 2007 06:52:18 -0800, Hyman Rosen wrote:

> On Feb 26, 7:34 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <r...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
>> The problem is that if it doesn't fit, you can't recover
> 
> Granted, but that's not really the point. On a modern computer system,
> given that it's reading input from a file or standard input, the
> programmer can reasonably expect that there are at least many tens of
> megabytes available to be allocated. Sure there can be inputs that
> will exceed that, but then you're really in a different domain.
> 
> Think of it this way - when you decide to sort data, you need to
> choose between internal and external sorts. You can't do that without
> a notion of a threshold size. Clearly that size has increased over the
> years. Reading input is similar. Many programs can now very reasonably
> expect to read in their entire input into memory at once before
> processing any of it, and if that's not going to work because of
> allocation on the stack then there should be an alternative.

But Pascal's point still apply here. The size you are talking about, is it
just a programmer's expectation or a fact derived from the domain?

This nice-looking feature could provoke false expectations resulting in
poorly designed programs. I am undecided here.

P.S. Reading files into memory is a plague of modern programs. I remember a
problem of reading 3-4GB log file under Windows. Most of editors just
crashed after 20 minutes of hard work. And those rare who survived blocked
UI until reading the file to the end.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de