On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 15:34, Dan Sugalski wrote:If you want, you could think of the S-register strings as mini-PMCs. The encoding and charset stuff (we'll ignore language semantics for the moment) are essentially small vtables that hang off the string, and whatever we do with it mostly goes through those vtable functions.
Yeah, I was thinking that perhaps all the non-buffer semantics should have been a PMC (that then wrapped and used the SREG with its byte-buffer semantics). The PMCs would then be as lax or strict with text semantics as it needed to be, without causing semantic interference to different language's needs. Everything's possible with enough abstraction, and all that. Slow and bulky, though. Oh, well, two years late and a dollar short.
Yeah, there's that bulk thing. I'd thought about making strings just PMCs way back at the beginning, but there's that whole regex thing--I knew that for speed, the code'd ultimately have to say something like "Hey, you, string! Make yourself UTF-32, get normalized, and gimme your buffer pointer dammit!" Without that low-level access we aren't going to be able to get the speed we need, which kinda limits the abstraction there.
--
Dan
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