On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
But yes, it leaves a lot to be desired. Bryan Jurish has taken a
different approach, which is to use lists of bytes to represent strings.
Might be worth checking out.
An advantage using the list-of-bytes approach is that because each
character can be represented by a rather large integer, it can be extended
to work on lists-of-characters meaning quickly, if there is a [utf8decode]
and [utf8encode] to turn bytes into characters and back; also it's a
method that is available now and reuses the existing list objects; and
it's a method that supports \0 (NUL) characters.
Disadvantages are that it takes more time to convert to C strings and
back, it takes more space in .pd files, it isn't readable as text in .pd
files, it takes up to 4 times more space to represent in .pd files, and
exactly 4 times more space in RAM (in the case that just iso-latin-1 is
used), and also that you can't make lists of strings like that.
(By the time we can have real strings, we can have nested-lists, and the
other way around, because they'd use the same mechanisms. whether it's
better to make them two types or one type, is a good question.)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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