[mercury-users] string__first_char

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

	Otherwise it seems that working with strings will be uncomfortably
	slow without dropping down to C.
	
ISO 10646 characters (see 'wchar_t' in C or C++) are 31-bit codes.
The 16-bit barrier was actually breached within the last year or two.
I fail to see why processing 31-bit characters in a word-aligned way
should be "uncomfortably slow".

More to the point, working with strings is a mistake in any programming
language.  Strings are the ultimate data UNstructure.  The only thing they
are really good at is holding uninterpreted data that you are going to hand
straight back to the source you got it from.

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