Shared substrings
d96-mst-ingen-reklam@xxxxxx
(03 May 2000 21:34 UTC)
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Re: Shared substrings erik hilsdale (04 May 2000 15:53 UTC)
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Re: Shared substrings
d96-mst-ingen-reklam@xxxxxx
(07 May 2000 09:39 UTC)
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Re: Shared substrings
shivers@xxxxxx
(07 May 2000 21:24 UTC)
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Re: Shared substrings
Tom Lord
(04 May 2000 16:51 UTC)
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Re: Shared substrings
Arthur A. Gleckler
(04 May 2000 17:32 UTC)
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Re: Shared substrings erik hilsdale 04 May 2000 15:53 UTC
ms == d96xxxxxx@d.kth.se (Mikael Ståldal) ms> I still don't like the current practice of allowing START and ms> END parameters to almost every procedures, since this encourage ms> a bad programming style. If you need the performance of shared ms> substrings, you should use a Scheme implementation which have ms> that, or write your programs in C instead, IMHO. If we were writing a language spec then I might fight to keep these optional parameters out. Then I would have the power to require all implementors of the language to implement shared substrings. I might even require them to optimize (string-foo (substring mystr 33 99)) ==> (%string-foo mystr 33 99) so even programmers who are as miserly about generating garbage as I am would be comfortable with using shared substrings, knowing that the sharing would only be virtual in the common case. But we're not writing (well, editing? taking pot shots at?) a language spec. We're writing a library spec, and one that should be useful to even those few unimportant Scheme implementations developed by people who for some reason or another had better things to do than add shared substring support to their runtime. I wish that I could treat the three elements of a substring as one argument and yet be guaranteed it would be passed in three registers/framelocs/whatever in the common non-heap-allocated case. That is, I wish Scheme had/required ML's tuple unpacking. It (the language, and all implementations of it that I'm aware of) doesn't and it (the language) never will. But I sometimes need the speed that such unpacking would give me. I like the optional arguments. I'll use them when I need such efficiency. Heck, I've already used versions of half of them (versions that, alas, didn't have the benefit of Olin's consistent design) in my CGI scripting in Chez Scheme. Bad programming style? I'm not convinced. An idiom forced upon us to get efficiency out of a non-statically-typed-and-frequently-incrementally-compiled language? Sure. ms> However, I have a compromise idea. Instead of the optional START ms> and END parameters, allow using a list '(s start end) instead of ms> the string parameter. I'm not sure I understand how this is a win over the optional start/end parameters, apart from generating more garbage and feeling more Lispy ("Lists can do anything! We can even treat them as strings. Sometimes"). -erik