5) Tom Satter rightly pointed out that we have to choices: having callback that gets called each time an element is found or creating the entire structure and offering an API for navigating into it. I do esitate to do the latter because I've heard of ABC files with thousands of songs in it! I would like to be able ot handle them without requiring megs and megs of memory.
Good idea. I've written a parser - it parses the entire file it is given and generates C++ objects of the appropriate type for each thing found. I have some files with 16500+ ABC tunes in. You would not believe (or maybe you would!) the memory consumption required for this. Its not that I've done a bad design - I write commercial software for a living, I know what I'm doing - its just staggering the overhead turning each ABC this-that-the other into an object with all its state etc. 'F' in ABC is one byte - but as an abcNote object its a shed load larger (virtual function table, note, accidental, all the other things that a note can have, data related to drawing it, playing it etc, etc, etc, then the C++ compiler wades in and aligns everything, consuming more space, etc, etc).
A different approach of find the tune you want and then parsing that tune requires a lot less memory, although that approach doesn't provide some of the searching facilities at your disposal if you take the approach I did (but my approach requires a good machine to run on - no low memory machines need apply!).
(Sorry, the parser I wrote is not available as a candidate for this project).
Stephen -- Stephen Kellett Object Media Limited http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk RSI Information: http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/rsi.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
