Re: [Caml-list] Immutable strings

[Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com>]

I haven't really been following this but I'm curious why a new type,
rstring, was not introduced?

But, as for the actual impact on the community.  This seems like a
question the OPAM team can answer now, right?  They can compile every
package with immutable strings turned on and see how many fail?  That
would give an idea of the impact and possibly suggest a migration path
or an alternative approach.

/M

Anthony Tavener <anthony.tavener@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm rather welcoming of the immutable change (hehe) of strings, but I
> haven't
> considered these details -- perhaps because I only use strings as immutable
> (currently with no such guarantee!), and use bigarray for a block of mutable
> bytes... which is your idea #3.
>
> It seems the "bytes" type would be most useful in cases where mutable and
> immutable strings are used in a mixed manner... but given these practical
> issues you raise, it could be less pleasant than it first appears. Your
> "stringlike" solution seems reasonable, but I don't have a good use-case in
> mind for mixed mutable/immutable to help me imagine the result. What are
> some
> scenarios where this mix of types is desired? I think even Rust doesn't
> support mutable strings -- which seems bold for its target audience, yet
> they're fine with it?
>
> When I consider possible scenarios of utf8 encoded strings, and mutating
> that
> in-place... ugh. Even "back in the day", doing string operations in C on
> ASCII, I'd favor building a new string rather than flirting with saving ops
> by
> overwriting values in the current string. Oh! Upper/lower-case! Maybe that's
> the one good use-case. ;)
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> I've just posted a blog article where I criticize the new concept of
>> immutable strings that will be available in OCaml 4.02 (as option):
>>
>> http://blog.camlcity.org/blog/bytes1.html
>>
>> In short my point is that it the new concept is not far reaching enough,
>> and will even have negative impact on the code quality when it is not
>> improved. I also present three ideas how to improve it.
>>
>> Gerd
>> --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
>> My OCaml site:          http://www.camlcity.org
>> Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
>> Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
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