OpenEuphoria

Re: Str-Kat

• Posted by Ricardo Forno <ricardoforno at tutop?a.?om> May 30, 2008
• 686 views

My two cents on the subject:
Since it seems that something will be done regarding strings,
a solution I envision is to add a field to the internal sequence descriptor
telling how many bits has an atom for this particular sequence.
The programmer will in principle be unaware of the atom length, and EU will
automatically take care of this attribute.
For example, assume an empty sequence is being filled with chars via &= or
append(). This sequence will contain only 8-bits atoms. If an Unicode char
is added, then all the previous elements will be transformed to 16-bit format.
If an integer is added (having a negative or high value), then all the previous
elements will be upgraded to the corresponding size.
This will even allow for 1-bit elements, or to have integers up to 128
using a single byte, so increasing both space and time efficiency.
After all, this is already done when you append a fraction to a sequence
that is only composed by integers.
Regards.