As I said, I am not a programmer, so the finer points of programming are lost on me. As an user however, and more as a social scientist, I have to deal with statistical data and/or text documents. For statistical data, especially time series data, I feel more comfortable in having the computer read/process a whole variable (all records) at once rather than piecemeal. For text documents, I also feel more comfortable in having the computer read the entire document at once and then process it according to my requirements. Bottom line however, I am open to any technique that gets the job done with minimum programming effort on my part. But that's just an user's perspective. I appreciate that a programmer's perspective may be very different.