In article <lhug0ryz4z1xxxxxx@gont.parc.xerox.com>,
erik hilsdale <xxxxxx@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:

>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.

This is silly. If you really need the extra speed, then use a Scheme
implementation with shared substrings, or another language (such as C).

>  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,

The advantage is that you can store the string with the indices as one
(conceptual) unit, thus making the program code easier to maintain and
less error-prone.

Please don't destroy the nice high-level Scheme language with these
exaggerated low-level optimazion efforts.

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