On 2012/07/21 7:01, David Starner wrote:
I'm concerned about the statement/implication that one can optimize
for ASCII and Latin-1. It's too easy for a lot of developers to test
speed with the English/European documents they have around and test
correctness only with Chinese. I see the argument in theory and
practice, but it's a tough line to walk, especially if you're not
familiar with i18n.
I can see for i in range (1, 1000) do a := " "; a +:= "龜"; done being
way slower than necessary (especially for non-trivially optimized away
cases), for example.
The main problem with the above loop isn't ASCII vs. Chinese or some
such. It's that depending on the way the programming language handles
Strings, it will result in a painter's algorithm phenomenon (see
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html).
Regards, Martin.
