Re: immediate strings #2

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 11/30/11 08:43, Ken Raeburn wrote:
> Currently it appears that we can have both unibyte and multibyte zero-length strings

Thanks good point.  There are other possibilities.  We can use
PTRDIFF_MAX, not -1, as the special value indicating that
the string is unibyte.  Or we could have size_byte count
the trailing null, and use 0 as the special value; that
might be more efficient.  Or we could use a special
marker in the immediate data (after the trailing null), used
only with empty strings, to specify whether the empty string
is multibyte.  I'm sure there are other ways to do it --
the point is that we need not arbitrarily restrict strings
to half their size merely to get one special size value.