needle -filter

[Peter Rice]

José R. Valverde wrote:

> OK, time to abandon lurker mode.

Welcome!!!

> 	First, this is old stuff. K&R show how to handle this situations in
> their classic "The C Programming Language". The same approach may be used 
> at any level (i.e. more than one character): simply use a bigger read buffer
> (or a dynamic one).

But don't forget ... EMBOSS could be reading a huge stream through 
stdin. Something like a complex getz query piped in. You really do not 
want to hold all that in memory just for the odd special case.

EMBOSS buffers a set number of lines for possible GCG input (if it has 
to guess the format) - but the buffer is for one input stream.

We are talking about multiple input streams here, and special processing 
of stdin. It just doesn't look nice to me.

Anyway, clearly a topic for tomorrow's EMBOSS team meeting....

Peter