[mercury-users] string_stream impl, re: redirecting output to streams

[Ian MacLarty]

Sorry for sending this twice.  I didn't come through for a long time,  
so I sent it again thinking it got lost.

On 16 Feb 2006, at 19:57, Ian MacLarty wrote:

> On 16 Feb 2006, at 03:55, Ralph Becket wrote:
>
>> Ian MacLarty, Wednesday, 15 February 2006:
>>> Not in principle, but I think you might have problems with the C code
>>> that ultimately does things with the strings (for example instead of
>>> passing the string to printf to write it out, you'd have to have  
>>> extra
>>> code to handle nulls in the string which might be an efficiency
>>> problem).
>>
>> Many functions in the string library are O(n) rather than O(1) because
>> they always do string bounds checking.  It would be better to define
>>
>> typedef struct { MR_Integer length; const char chars[] } MR_String;
>>
>> and then pass MyStr->chars to C rather than just MyStr.
>>
>> I think this would be a Good Change to make.
>>
>
> One question:  How do you propose to handle nulls in the writing out  
> of strings?  I mean suppose I build up a string and there is a null in  
> there somewhere and then I write out the string.  Should the string  
> only be written out to the null, even though it's length is greater  
> than the position of the null?  Certainly for binary strings you'd  
> want to print the whole thing out, even the characters past the null.   
> This will require you to use something else besides printf.  Perhaps  
> there should be different predicates for writing out all the  
> characters in a string and for writing out only the characters up till  
> the first null, but then why not have two types?
>
> Ian.
>
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