[Biococoa-dev] BCScanner

[Koen van der Drift]

On Mar 15, 2005, at 10:40 AM, John Timmer wrote:

> I haven't had a chance to checkout the code you put in, but just a  
> quick
> question:  what's the advantage to having a scanner for digests, as  
> opposed
> to just having the sequence finder return the array of all site ranges?
> Just a gut response, but having one less intervening object would  
> improve
> code efficiency and readability, so I'm wondering what having the  
> scanner
> would provide.
>
> In no way am I saying we shouldn't eventually create a scanner, mind  
> you,
> just wondering about its use in this case.
>

This dates back to an early discussion, where it was suggested that it  
would be nice if we have a NSScanner equivalent that deals with native  
BCSequences. I think Alex made the initial interface of BCScanner, I  
just started to add some implementation. See this thread:

http://bioinformatics.org/pipermail/biococoa-dev/2004-September/ 
000286.html


If we use a plain NSScanner, we add two conversion steps between a  
BCSequence and its string which could add some overhead:

BCSequence -> string -> NSScanner -> strings -> BCSequences.




- Koen.