On Wed, 14 Nov 2007, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Not really, but if you consider symbols as a kind of immutable string,
then this is not uncommon as a string-like type in programming
languages. It even seems to have some advantages, as this text about
Lua's strings hints at:
http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2005/06/lua-and-unique-strings/ In Pd, garbage
collection of unused symbols is missing, though.
If I ever finally implement reference-count deallocation of symbols, it's
going to be unique strings anyway, because it has to; else I'd have
to make a string type separate from the symbol type. I just didn't know
that it would bring Pd that much closer to Lua.
Once it's done, there is some further fine-tuning that can be done, so
that the hash-function (used for figuring out positions in the
symbol-table) doesn't take too long to compute, but at this point it's not
even worth thinking about it.
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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada
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