Re: [Caml-list] Immutable strings

[Anthony Tavener <anthony.tavener@gmail.com>]

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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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>
>
>
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