Re: Another alternative string representation proposal

[Carl R. Witty]

Keisuke Nishida <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden (Carl R. Witty) writes:
> 
> > > Is owner_p really necessary?  If a char-field is read-only, it is not
> > > the owner of the character sequence.  If it is mutable or immutable,
> > > we can force the char-field to own the sequence.
> > 
> > I can see at least one potential use for a mutable, not-owned string:
> > it could be used by a guile wrapper for mmap.  Although probably it
> > would be better to use a different, specialized type for this; so
> > that's not much of an argument...
> 
> If you modify mmap'ed memory, it is copied anyway, isn't it?  And we'd
> like to use shared mapping rather than private mapping, right?  I think
> mmap'ed memory should be read-only.

You can use mmap'ed memory for inter-process communication, or for
read-write access to a file (a database, say).  In those cases you
want a shared writable mapping.

Carl Witty