[PD-dev] Pd Strings

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Fri Nov 23 11:40:39 CET 2007


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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