From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: "Mattias Engdegård" <mattias.engdegard@gmail.com>
Cc: 58168@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#58168: string-lessp glitches and inconsistencies
Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2022 08:36:46 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <83tu4mais1.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <B56DE6FE-732D-432D-B2C2-1B54FC8472B1@gmail.com> (message from Mattias Engdegård on Sat, 1 Oct 2022 21:57:45 +0200)
> From: Mattias Engdegård <mattias.engdegard@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2022 21:57:45 +0200
> Cc: 58168@debbugs.gnu.org
>
> 1 okt. 2022 kl. 07.22 skrev Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
>
> > It depends on the use case, but in general I see no problem with
> > signaling errors when we cannot produce reasonably correct results.
> > For example, string-to-unibyte does signal an error in some cases.
>
> That's fine because that function is documented to do so and always has, but making previously possible comparisons raise errors shouldn't be done lightly.
I didn't say "lightly", nor do I think so. We need to discuss
specific use cases.
An alternative is to always convert unibyte non-ASCII strings to their
multibyte representation before comparing.
> Comparison between objects is not only useful when someone cares about their order, as in presenting a sorted list to the user. Often what is important is an ability to impose an order, preferably total, for use in building and searching data structures. I came across this bug when implementing a string set.
Always converting to multibyte handles this case, doesn't it?
> >> It's also a matter of performance -- string< has been improved recently but currently we compare text in Latin and Swahili much faster than French and Arabic; it would be nice to close that gap. UTF-8 is designed so that comparing strings by scalar values can be done byte-wise, but the way we encode raw bytes make them sort right between ASCII and Latin-1. Given that the specific order doesn't matter much, we could just run with that.
> >
> > I see no reason to make comparison of unibyte and multibyte strings
> > perform better.
>
> Actually I was talking about multibyte-multibyte comparisons.
Then why did you mention raw bytes? their multibyte representation
presents no performance problems, AFAIU.
> You were probably thinking about comparisons between unibyte strings that contain raw bytes and multibyte strings, and those are indeed not very performance-sensitive. However there is no way to detect whether a unibyte string contains non-ASCII chars without looking at every byte, and comparing unibyte ASCII with multibyte is definitely of interest. Strings are still unibyte by default.
You can compare under the assumption that a unibyte string is
pure-ASCII until you bump into the first non-ASCII one. If that
happens, abandon the comparison, convert the unibyte string to its
multibyte representation, and compare again.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-10-02 5:36 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 40+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-09-29 16:24 bug#58168: string-lessp glitches and inconsistencies Mattias Engdegård
2022-09-29 17:00 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-09-29 17:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-09-30 20:04 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-01 5:22 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-01 19:57 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-02 5:36 ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2022-10-03 19:48 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-04 5:55 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-04 17:40 ` Richard Stallman
2022-10-04 18:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-06 9:05 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-06 11:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-07 14:23 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-08 7:35 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-14 14:39 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-14 15:31 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-17 12:44 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-09-30 13:52 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2022-09-30 20:12 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-01 5:34 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-01 11:51 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-01 10:02 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2022-10-01 10:12 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-01 13:37 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-01 13:43 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2022-10-03 19:48 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-04 10:44 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2022-10-04 11:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-04 14:44 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-04 16:24 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-06 9:05 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-06 11:13 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-06 12:43 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-06 14:34 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-07 14:45 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-07 15:33 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-08 17:13 ` Mattias Engdegård
2022-10-01 13:51 ` Eli Zaretskii
2022-10-01 5:30 ` Eli Zaretskii
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=83tu4mais1.fsf@gnu.org \
--to=eliz@gnu.org \
--cc=58168@debbugs.gnu.org \
--cc=mattias.engdegard@gmail.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this external index
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.