On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:02:56PM +0200, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote: > [1] It would be possible to compose character names for the life-time of > the process, but these names would need to be checked for uniqueness > (performance problem).
With our grapheme approach we will certainly compose unique graphemes to be temporarily representable with single (negative) integers, so the table of these can easily map the integer to a temporarily composed name. Going the other direction is just a hash to integer, which should scale O(1)ishly, albeit with a larger constant. Currently parrot plans to implement these tables per-string rather than per-process, but the idea is the same. In any event, correctness before optimization applies. If we can make graphemes work (more or less) the way users expect rather than the way computers expect, we will have achieved a strong bit of disruptive technology, which alone would make Perl 6 a better choice for text processing than many other current offerings. And as Todd Proebsting has pointed out, in order to produce a disruptive technology, you pretty much have to plan to do something *worse* rather than better, so I'm not so worried about the performance at this point. Larry
