On Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 18:15:16 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
At least on Java world it is not quite true.
And that's why I said a language like C/C++ that allows aliasing.
If you use XML parsers that return a DOM or SAX, yes quite true.
But as far as I can tell, XML streaming parsers (StAX) only
parse on demand.
It's been a while since I used it, but the Apache SAX parser
(Xerces?) converts all string input to wchar_t before passing it
to the callback. And since XML input is nearly always in UTF-8,
this can mean a ton of transcoding.