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Re: strings rationale
From: |
Rob Browning |
Subject: |
Re: strings rationale |
Date: |
15 Aug 2001 10:28:38 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7 |
Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> Can symbols be used as strings? Can there be substrings of symbols?
After reading this thread, I have to say that I really don't like the
idea of symbols being transparently interchangable in *any* context
with strings. Some of the arguments I've heard in favor of this
change sound like they could also be used to argue for the
interchangability of integers and strings, and I doubt anyone would be
in favor of that. In fact, just that kind of type vagary is the
single thing I hate most about Tcl.
Further, if you do make strings and symbols interchangable, what do
you do about:
- case sensitivity?
- performance? Consider future compilation optimizations -- i.e. I
believe stalin doesn't even keep the symbol string representations
around if it doesn't ever need to read/write them. While you
might be able to do the same trick with a shared symbol/string
type, we should be careful to consider the issue before making the
types similar.
In general, I tend to think that this kind of change would be making a
promise to people writing code that we'd be permanently stuck with,
even if it turned out to be a bad idea later, and we shouldn't do that
without *compelling* reasons, and the general support of the broader
Scheme community.
--
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C 64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD
- Re: making up language features, (continued)
- Re: making up language features, Sam Tregar, 2001/08/06
- Re: making up language features, Tom Lord, 2001/08/06
- Re: making up language features, Sam Tregar, 2001/08/06
- Re: making up language features, Klaus Schilling, 2001/08/07
- Re: making up language features, Chris Cramer, 2001/08/07
- Re: making up language features, Thien-Thi Nguyen, 2001/08/15
- Re: strings rationale, Marius Vollmer, 2001/08/06
- Re: strings rationale, Eric E Moore, 2001/08/07
- Re: strings rationale, Alex Shinn, 2001/08/06
- Re: strings rationale, Marius Vollmer, 2001/08/06
- Re: strings rationale,
Rob Browning <=
- was Re: strings rationale, Tom Lord, 2001/08/15