Strings are passed by value, not by reference, so they are not particularly efficient. We all know that strings can be very long (as in 'how long is a piece of...'), so an assignment involving the concatentation of two long strings must be quite expensive. Using 'put after' or 'put before' should allow some of this lost efficiency to be regained.
However, I have not done any tests to confirm this. (Any takers?)
to my knowledge strings are handled a bit trickier (since ...D8.5 ??), in that they get passed by reference, and all variables which reference the string point to the same address in memory as long as their content doesn't get changed, in that case the reference is tossed and the altered string will be written to a new address. so memory only needs to be allocated, if the string is changed.
I don't know exactly how to test this with lingo only (I vaguely remember an xtra, maybe one of daniel devolders ? which showed the address in memory of the data referenced by a variable).
and I even may have gotten this completely wrong, but as I understood a director engeneer once, it was changed for D 8.5 / 8.5.1 or even DMX to work that way.
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