On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[...] I looked at the definition of symbol->string and found out that it
is not a constant operation (like returning some pointer) but constructs
a string. Does anyone have a more efficient comparison of symbols
implemented? [...]
Hello,
as far as I know, symbols with identical names are always pointer equal in
CHICKEN unless one of them has been created using gensym, so if you just
need equality comparisons, eq? will be the fastest option.
If you want alphabetic ordering, you should avoid symbol->string, because
it copies the name of the symbol to a new string -- this is necessary as
Scheme's strings are mutable objects! I would suggest accessing the name
slot of the symbol directly and defining
(define (symbol-compare a b)
(##sys#check-symbol a 'symbol-compare)
(##sys#check-symbol b 'symbol-compare)
(string-compare (##sys#slot a 1) (##sys#slot b 1)))
I hope that helps,
Thomas
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