* Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> [2007-08-03 17:02]: > On Aug 3, 2007, at 0:59, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > >* Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> [2007-08-02 21:45]: > >>> Please have the length of strings upfront. > > >>Length encoding isn't self-syncing, > > >Synching the length is O(1). > > Can you elaborate on that comment, because I don't see how you > can in principle resync a stream of length-prefixed records > without any sentinel values. And if you have sentinels you're > back where you started.
I didn't realise you were talking specifically about *lists* of strings represented by a successing of zero-terminated strings. I though you were talking about single strings being self-syncing, which I understood to mean the same thing that Andy meant: you can futz around with the allocated length of a zero-terminated string without having to update any part of the string. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
