[Denzel]

Yes, this is engineering in a nutshell: determining a course of action within a set of constraints that meets your objectives. Where constraints can be time, cost, physical limitations (processor speed, memory size, disk space), etc; and objectives can be functional (user can edit files), nonfunctional (user can edit large files in < X seconds, energy usage), personal learning, or any number of other requirements.

The GP offered a valid decision point to consider based upon what an engineer is solving for. I don’t think he said that an array was the solution he’d ship in a production text editor to millions of end-users.

Engineering is hardly naive. :)

[userbinator]

Actually, that's exactly what I was saying --- plenty of existing text editors use the "stupid" single array, yet no one complains about their performance.

One example? Notepad.

[ethbro]

Notepad is notepad because someone, god bless their soul, had the sense to put new features into a different app as Wordpad.

In some terrible, dark dimension, Notepad has a ribbon interface and supports PDFs.

[tripzilch]

Just because people tend not to edit large files in Notepad doesn't mean they'll complain about it when they do. Actual complaints are of course sparse because hardly anyone uses Notepad for anything serious if they can use an alternative. BUT when they do, oh they will complain.

I believe an older version of Notepad even had a (fairly low) limit on file size it would open.

I mean that's the reverse argument, computers have gigabytes of memory today, and are super fast, so you should be able to load a multi gigabyte text file and edit it, on a single line, with word wrapping.