[PD-dev] strings

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, martin.peach at sympatico.ca wrote:
> If ascii values from 0 - 31 can be part of symbols that would be nice. 
> How do you specify a symbol containing ascii values 1 2 and 3? Do they 
> have names?

Do it the way most languages have borrowed from C : use backslash followed 
by an octal or hex code, like \033 or \0x1b. It's easy to make it 
compatible with C/C++/Java/Perl/Python/Tcl/Ruby/PHP, all at the same time.

>> Symbols could be usable, if the problems that can be fixed in symbol
>> without changing the nature of symbols, are fixed. You don't need strings
>> for that.
> You still have the problem of the symbol table that grows by one each time the symbol changes.

Well, you can solve that problem separately. There's no point to clump all 
issues into one ball.

>> Wouldn't you want objects to be able to emit strings in a way as 
>> carefree as they are with symbols? I'm talking about not putting the 
>> burden of memory management on the emitter of strings.
> A string library could have functions similar to getbytes(), 
> resizebytes() and freebytes()

Yes, that's putting the burden of memory management on the emitter. I 
mean, what I call "the burden of memory management" isn't about writing 
your own malloc() from scratch, no, I'm not talking about that, I'm 
talking about having to decide when to copy and when to deallocate.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada