On 2 February 2018 at 14:28, Martin Ward <mar...@gkc.org.uk> wrote: > > Incidentally, perl strings can be over 4GB in length: in fact, > any size which will will fit in memory (including swap space). >
Just don't let the ASN.1 folks come closer, or you end up with variable length length fields... ;-) I would think that when things get long enough, the requirement for consecutive storage of the characters would be restrictive. Implementing a string as a series of (address,length) pairs would solve that, and would also make for elegant string concatenation. Considering that most strings are less than 4GB, I would be tempted to maybe use negative length to imply the extra indirection, and use positive length for characters following the length. If functions return such strings, you'd need a garbage collector as well... sigh. Rob
