begin quoting Chuck Esterbrook as of Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 12:41:01PM -0800: [snip] > But um, wouldn't comparing strings be awfully slow?
Well, at least proportional to the (average) length of the string. > In Objective-C symbols are strings that have been put through a > function which adds them or pulls them from a pool of unique strings. > After that they can be done as pointer comparisons with no > dereferencing which is screaming fast vs. comparing string contents. > > .NET has a similar concept called "interned strings". I don't know if Gosling made up the term or if it was common terminology already. I've found mention w/r/t Objective-C and Lisp, but nothing that really seems definitive as to where the term came from. -- Maybe this is where the Google masters Can show how they are search spellcasters. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
