System and method for efficient binary encoding of procedures in a document processing language

摘要

A system and method for converting a textual representation of nested procedures into a binary format where the binary format contains the length of each procedure at the beginning of the procedure. The system can be implemented using a single temporary storage buffer which is globally available to each procedure and procedures nested within. The first clear text procedure of a group of nested procedures causes the temporary storage buffer to be created. Memory locations are reserved in the temporary storage buffer for storing the length of the procedure, and then the procedure is converted to binary format which is then appended to the end of the buffer after the space reserved for the length of the procedure. Procedures which are nested within the first procedure also have space reserved in the buffer for length information and the binary representations of the nested procedures are appended onto the end of the buffer. When a procedure ends, the length of the procedure is calculated and written into the space previously reserved for length information. The single memory buffer can be considered a logically contiguous memory buffer. Other logically contiguous memory buffers include multiple memory buffers which can be kept track of using an array index of a double linked list data structure.