determining a plain text file

[Mark Smith]

On 10 Jul 2006, at 17:35, Bill Marriott wrote:

> Oh, that's *very* interesting, especially the hang/lockup part! I'm  
> going to
> have to play with this a little bit.
>
> Hard to beat 7 milliseconds vs. 6.5 seconds!
>


Not to disparage regexes, but everytime I see one of these neat one- 
line regex solutions on the list, and it's something that I might  
make use of, I seem to find that when used either many times in a  
loop, or just on a lot of data, it turns out be at least quite a lot  
slower than some function that uses Revs chunk expressions/repeat for  
loops.

I have no idea how efficient the PCRE library is, or how efficiently  
Rev uses that library, but it usually seems to be enough of a  
noticeable difference that I stick with the pure Revolution solution.


> Just goes to show that shorter code is often not faster code.
>

I think this is particularly true of high-level scripting languages  
like Revolution. I couldn't even guess what actual sequence of  
machine instructions is executed when I run a script. Fortunately, I  
very rarely would need to know, since it'll generally be quite fast  
enough for most purposes.

Best,

Mark