2009/8/25 Brian Mastenbrook <[email protected]>: > On Aug 24, 2009, at 8:37 PM, John Cowan wrote: >> were the only kind of strings Lisp had, people did string work with >> EXPLODE >> and IMPLODE, mapping symbols to and from a list of the characters in >> the symbol's print name. Those characters were themselves symbols, >> not a distinct datatype. That worked fine. > > Obviously not so fine that we're still using this mechanism, but I > don't think the reasons why not have much to do with the issue at > hand. :-)
Well actually, after spending some time reading the Stalin source code (and seeing how well it optimizes this kind of thing), I actually went back to using lists of characters for a large number of string algorithms. It really is a very graceful way to handle strings - substring, insert, and delete all become *very* cheap. It's a paradigm I'm quite sure that we ought to preserve. david rush -- GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
