Why do you always state everything as a challenge?

And why do your challenges always sound like they missed the point?

But since you go to the effort of putting my name in the title, I will respond honestly.

The fact that a given kind of decoupling is desirable does not mean that all attempts to do it are created equal. In particular the outline of a design that runrig gave is one that looks a lot better to me. It should be very much faster than, on each record, having to dynamically rebind and rebuild your understanding of the record structure. (OK, so Perl does a dynamic rebinding and building, but that is done at the C level from a much simpler structure.) This is an inherent inefficiency that the API you created does not allow to be addressed.

Furthermore I don't like having code that I don't trust around. With many module authors I am willing to accept that they will produce code that I will trust. However I don't have that faith in your code. And the fact that - yet again - you were bit by using global variables in an instance where there is no good reason to use a global.

So we agree that the decoupling that you and Dave Cross talk about is important. Your invitation for me to refute the obvious is wasted. You spend energy trying to say that there is a problem, that a lot of people need to handle fixed data, that you don't want the documentation of your formats to be embedded in low-level parsing routines. Fine. Agreed. Accepted.

However you say nothing about why I or anyone else should want to use your solution. And that is the real problem here. Granted, the problem is not one I take personally becuse I don't encounter it, and would never create anything new with that issue. But if I needed to solve the problem, I would want a solution I can trust that was simple, fast and flexible. And frankly, you have failed to convince me.

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: Parse::FixedLength - better late than never (tilly read) by tilly
in thread does anyone else use Parse::FixedLength;? by cmilfo

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