Re: Worrying development

[Tom Lord <lord@emf.net>]

    > From: Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.de>
    > Tom Lord <lord@emf.net> writes:
    > > Mutation-sharing shared substrings are an upwards compatible extension
    > > to the Scheme standard.  They break no correct programs.  They enable
    > > new kinds of programs.

    > I'd say that the real 'trouble' is that strings are mutable at
    > all.

Worried mostly about variable-length character encodings in string?
Or you'd just rather be programming in an ML-family language? :-)

If it's variable-length encodings that irk you:  if strings were
read-only you'd want to optimize the heck out of STRING-APPEND and
SUBSTRING and, once you did that, you'd have essentially enough
machinery to do mutations efficiently.


    > Also, I still like the idea of using mutation-sharing substrings as
    > markers that allow O(1) access into variable-width encoded strings.

Interesting.  The interaction with STRING-SET! will be tricky.  I
think you'll either have to "timestamp" strings (one tick per mutation
-- and you'll likely have to use a GC'ed value rather than an inline
integer for timestamps) or wind up with O(K) for mutations where K is
the number of shared substrings.

The same problem comes up if you add STRING-RESIZE!.  I keep going
back and forth on whether or not strings should be the same things as
or a subset buffers vs. making buffers a completely separate type.
(The latter certainly seems to be easier to implement.)


    > Also, there is the possibility on the horizon that we turn
    > string-ref etc into 'primitive generics' which means that people
    > could implement new kinds of strings using GOOPS.

Well, heck.  In that case, maybe consider what I'm planning for Pika
(at least initially).  Purely ASCII strings are stored 1-byte per
character.  Most other strings 2-bytes per character.   Strings using
characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, 4 bytes per
character.

You want some fancier-than-libc string functions in C for that -- but
it gives you an expected-case O(1) for STRING-REF and STRING-SET! and
pretty good space efficiency.  It also gives you some performance
glitches as when you store a U+0100 character in an otherwise purely
ASCII 10MB string.  (We're working on providing such fancier-than-libc
functions in libhackerlab -- so they'd be available independently of
Pika if you went this route.)
  
-t



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