Ron Parker wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 22 Feb 2002 14:43:54 +0000, Grey Knight wrote:
> > My question; how far ahead does this look-ahead work? I have an idea for
> > a version of POVRay which will pass the scenefile to the parser in small
> > chunks (I'll explain why later), and I'd like to know how small I can
> > make those chunks without running into problems with look-ahead.
> 
> If you explain why now, we might be able to help you avoid povlegal pitfalls.

Well, I wanted to sort out some algorithims first so that Warp wouldn't
complain (j/k)
Basically, I wanted to see if I could store a .pov file as binary data
(with eg 0x10 representing the "sphere" keyword, 0x0C for "blob" or
whatever), and then compress that data into a file (I was thinking .pbz
for POV-Ray Binary Zipfile; also look what happens when you ROT13 it ;)
The idea is that the .pbz file will be much smaller than the .pov file,
so we can keep only the pbz data in memory, and translate it to text
when required by the editor or parser.

> The parser does not work as you think it does, but the general answer to your
> question is probably "a token's worth."  However, the parser expects to be
> able to go back and reread data it's already seen, and it expects to be able
> to do so by opening a file and doing a seek.
Hmm, perhaps we could just uncompress the data again if it wants to look
at old stuff?

These are all just ideas off the top of my head, I wanted to try and
realise it a bit more before I posted any detail.

-- 
signature{
  "Grey Knight" contact{ email "gre### [at] yahoocom" }
  site_of_week{ url "http://digilander.iol.it/jrgpov" }
}

Post a reply to this message