Glynn Clements wrote:
The problem with this approach is that the entire array has to be held in memory, which could be an issue if the amount of data involved is large.
Simple reasoning: If the amount of data is large, you don't want the overhead of lists because it kills performance. If the amount of data is small, you can easily use similar code to read/write a single byte. :-) Of course things are a bit different when you are in the blissful position where lazy I/O is what you want. This implies that you expect a stream of data of a single type. How often is this really the case? And I'm not sure if this the correct way of doing things even when the data involved wouldn't fit into memory all at once. I'd prefer something mmap-like then... Cheers, S.