Re: string-map arg order

[Gary Houston]

> From: Dirk Herrmann <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 22:09:45 +0200 (MEST)
> 
> However, I fully agree with you about the problems of multiple-width
> encodings:  In case of multiple threads, every access to one of a string's
> characters needs to recompute the memory location of that character,
> because some other thread might have changed the string and even replaced
> some characters of different encoding widths.
> 
> I have difficulties to believe that variable with encodings could
> practically work in the context of multithreading at all.

With the posix-style multithreading I don't think even the simple
strings we have now could be safely modified from multiple threads
without the user taking precautions such as use of mutexes.  And it
probably wouldn't be feasible to build the thread safety into every
string by default because performance would become abysmal (or is it
only when you start getting serious and flush each processor memory
cache whenever it may be needed, that performance becomes abysmal?)