Read a file line by line: Difference between revisions

J currently discourages this "read just one line" approach. In addition to the arbitrary character of lines, there are issues of problem size and scope (what x happens when you have a billion characters between your newline delimiters?). Usually, it's easier to just read the entire file, or memory map the file, and when files are so large that that is not practical it's probably better to put the programmer in explicit control of issues like block sizes and exception handling.