[erlang-questions] Strings as Lists

[Zvi]

Hi Christian,


Christian S wrote:
> 
> I would ask "Why do some programmers store their large text-masses as
> lists?"
> 
> Of course, I know the answer already; because there is a 'string'
> module that operates on lists as strings. Lazy buggers.
> 

Still there is a need for standard string datatype, which will be good for
90% of uses and it should be accepted by all standard libs.
I reperesent strings as binaries, and my code become much more verbose
(almost unreadable), i.e using:
* <<"ABC">>, instead of "ABC"
* <<S1/bytes,S2/bytes>> instead of S1++S2
* using file:delete(binary_to_list(Filename)) instead of
file:delete(Filename)
* xmerl and erlsom parse into lists and not binaries (I heard about expat
port, which can parse binary XML, but I don't know how to extract it's code
out of ejabberd).
etc.


Christian S wrote:
> 
> - list of words and a word-dictionary (features quicker scanning of
> ...words, efficient storage too)
> 

I want to implement something like this, but using atoms for words. Is this
a good idea?
There is a limit to number of atoms in VM (I think ~1M). I can preload lists
of atoms-per-word and then use only list_to_existing_atom ...
I'll have around 100000 words/atoms. Do you think that it's much better to
use ets with integer word IDs mapped to binaries?


Christian S wrote:
> 
> For the scanning of protocols, I have been looking at Ragel as a tool
> to create C-code FSMs as a loadable driver that recognizes tokens and
> sends these tokens to the port owner process. The port owner in turn
> feeds the port binary chunks, since incremental parsing isnt much of a
> problem for state machines.
> 

How Ragel is better, than other lexical analysers? Do you use it primarily
because it's parsing binary input, why Erlang leexer working with lists?

BR,
Zvi


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