Chapter 6. Refining the Design

It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation.

—Henry David Thoreau

This chapter lays the design foundation for the more advanced utilities developed in the next three chapters. High-level design issues are discussed and base classes are created. It is primarily oriented toward developers, though users of the utilities may find useful background on how to describe the grammars of the legacy formats and the file description documents that encode those grammars.