RE: Just say 'OF' to strings
As far as I can see, this whole debacle (and yes, this wording is
intentional) revolves around the ability of Euphoria to recognise that a
sequence of characters is a string, and that a sequence of arbitrary values
is not...
1. If strings are desired for a smaller memory footprint, a smaller
footprint is not possible if unicode strings are to be supported. The
band_aid solution of adding yet *another* native type; the U_STRING, will
exponentially compound the problems with increasing the number of native
types.
2. If a string is desired to get away from the interpreter printing out the
string in { , , , } form accidentally...
2a. First of all, for any singular variable, you should *KNOW* what whether
the variable is a generic sequence or a string, and use print and puts
accordingly. If you want strings to display nicely in the trace window, Rob
is implementing new functionality in upcoming versions of Euphoria to allow
the community to write their own trace windows. I would think that you could
quite easily create some 'sticky' options within the new tracers that could
display sequence variables as strings, arrays of strings, etc, and even
reverse polish notation if you had the inclination.
2b. Secondly, if you have a large sequence with generic values, where the
type of each value is not known in advance... I'd say that's BAD
programming. Yes, you cannot differentiate between string and generic
sequence, but you can't differentiate between an integer, and an atom that
just happens to be a whole number, or any two custom types that may be able
to fit into each other - eg 3d_vector and rgb.
If you want to do something like that, have a prefix to each type with an
integer constant identifying it.
ie: { {INT, 5}, {STRING, {50, 48, 77, 29} }, { SEQ, {50, 48, 77, 29} },
{3D_VEC, {50, 48, 77}, {RGB, {50, 48, 77} }
Y'see what problems could arise without these prefixes? The only way out of
that would be to apply rigid casting to *everything*, and that would really
screw things up.
Adding a "STRING" type will not fix ANYTHING. Consider another problem: if
you pass a literal to a function accepting a value of object, what type does
that object hold? Is it a sequence, or a string, or both, or neither?
What???
I think that the string type would not be necessary for the purposes above.
If you want to ensure that a sequence remains compatible with the idea of a
string, and does not inadvertently contain invalid data inside it, support
the drive for "OF"! :o)
MrTrick
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