On 10/24/2010 07:07 PM, Ben Goldberg wrote: > I know that perl6 has / will have lazy strings, since (in > S32::Containers) the List role defines a cat method, which returns a > Cat object, which "does the Str interface, but generates the string > lazily." > > First, are Cat objects documented anywhere else?
I don't think so. It's one of the areas that will become clearer when somebody actually implements them. > Secondly, if a regular expression match is done on a lazy string, is > that lazy string turned into a normal string? No; that wouldn't make much sense. It would be like reifing lazy lists prior to iteration. > If we can efficiently match against a lazy string, and if this doesn't > turn the lazy string into a (large) normal string, then the best way > to process a file might be something similar to: > my $fh = open ... err die; > my $contents = cat($fh.lines); > , followed by matching on $contents. > > Better still would be to provide a way for filehandles to be directly > asked to produce a lazy Str which reflects the file. I guess there's no good reason not to have a .Cat method in the IO class - another thing that'll likely appear when Cats are implemented. Cheers, Moritz
