optimization question

[Andrew Koenig]

Bo> Before send to you this 'a in blah' I thought, that probably you
Bo> working with binary data. But anyway here's something missed,
Bo> maybe in whole design. I dunno: I just don't like this way:
Bo> array[a:b] == c Maybe we should know more about what are you
Bo> doing. For example, what is that "poorly specified input data" --
Bo> is it some binary data or plain/text or mixed or....?.. :/

I'm trying to write a library that will let its users specify
how to extract data from large sequences (not necessarily strings
of characters).  The question I asked pertains to one small corner
of the overall problem.  As the library is far from complete, I
don't yet know how large a corner it is.

-- 
Andrew Koenig, ark at research.att.com, http://www.research.att.com/info/ark