Re: Shared strings

[Tom Lord]

       I assume that if you think of shared substrings for text crunching you
       don't especially think of the 'feature' to be able to modify string s1
       by modifying string s2, right?

No.  I've written text crunching code where that was a desirable
feature.

        Guile's shared substrings did not have the copy-on-write
        semantics.

That could be implemented as an option that applies to some shared 
substrings, but not others.  That would also be a desirable feature.

Shared substrings make good sense as a physical representation.
Making sure that built-in string functions can handle shard substrings
costs little and is extremely convenient.  So, in my opinion, they
should be in the language and the challenge is to design them in
cleanly.

-t