TODO 1016 B

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  1. Most TODOs live in the TODO section of doc/file.man (i.e. file(1)).
  2. They are more visible there, so please add any further TODOs to that
  3. file, not here. More speculative material can live here.
  4. (This change was made when Reuben Thomas noticed that all the bugs
  5. listed in the BUGS section of the man page had been fixed!)
  6. ---
  7. It would be nice to simplify file considerably. For example,
  8. reimplement the apprentice and non-pattern magic methods in Python,
  9. and compile the magic patterns to a giant regex (or something similar;
  10. maybe using Ragel (http://www.complang.org/ragel/)) so that only a
  11. small amount of C is needed (because fast execution is typically only
  12. required for soft magic, not the more detailed information given by
  13. hard-wired routines). In this regard, note that hplip, which is
  14. BSD-licensed, has a magic reimplementation in Python.
  15. Read the kerberos magic entry for more ideas.
  16. Write a string merger to make magic entry sizes dynamic.
  17. Strings will be converted to offsets from the string table.