Just use a full word, and the string representation can use a more 
packed form to avoid waste.

If a full word still cannot encompass the desired set of character, use 
a tagged word representation (like tagged polymorphic representations in 
functional languages), where if the lowest order bit is cleared it's 
unboxed, and if it's set, it's a multiword boxed character.

Sandro

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer.
>
> Once again: string representation is not the issue at hand. The
> question is only what the size of the "char" data type should be.
>
> Jonathan
>
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:02 AM, Constantine Plotnikov
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:06 AM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>>     
>>> Is there an obviously preferable choice? If not, then given that we want to
>>> be able to target these platforms, what do you think we should to about all
>>> this?
>>>
>>>       
>> Some time ago I stumbled across the project where some experiments
>> with string representation were apparently done
>> (https://trac.ccs.neu.edu/trac/larceny/wiki/StringRepresentations). I
>> have not found a detailed information on the site about what the
>> recordN format is. It looks like they claim O(1) read/write random
>> access while having N+20 bytes memory usage for ASCII strings(?).
>> Possibly it would make sense to contact them about it.
>>
>> Constantine
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>>
>>     
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