README
$Revision: 1.1 $

The xlate reader code is written with the idea that on opening
a handle one decides what functions to call to implement the
externally visible functions.  Each function, then, need not
do run-time checks every time called to determine what
kind of table is involved: where necessary different functions
are provided for each 'kind of table'.

This is a sort of primitive object-oriented-programming
approach to reading the xlate table.

It makes for more functions, but each function is tailored
to what it has to do.

One hopes the result is both easy to understand and efficient.

The #define TURN_OFF_MEMO
will, if presented, to the code, turn off the memoization
functionality.  The only reason to do this would be to
verify that without the memo stuff the code still works.
The memoization code (all conditionalized with TURN_OFF_MEMO)
makes the library much faster and this code should allways be on
so except possibly for certain experiments or debugging
TURN_OFF_MEMO should never be defined.

I did not want to have a mysterious #define required to
get the fast performance.   Instead use it to get bog slow performance
if you really want slow :-)


davea Aug 6,1996.