Re: Worrying development

[tomas]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 10:41:05AM +0100, Roland Orre wrote:
> At the moment I'm somewhat in a crisis how to continue with guile.

[about the disappearing of shared substrings in Guile]

Hrm. I wasn't very happy with this decision either. But since
Dirk et al were doing the grunt work and I had nothing to
contribute, I decided to shut up.

As far as I remember, the main reasons for this step were
simplicity (with shared substrings you get to choose between
changes propagating from substrings to the containing string
(you don't always want that, although sometimes), a
copy-on-write implementation. Which is right?).

Besides, with non-shared substrings, you may guarantee
null-termination which helps naïve C interfacing (not a
major advantage to my eyes, but...).

I'd propose to implement a higher-level library (perhaps
using GOOPS) in which strings (or more generally arrays)
are implemented as (lists/trees/arrays) of arrays. That'd
help designing an interface, and when done (and if necessary),
re-implementing as smobs in C (or steal a datatype ;-)

Opinions?

-- tomás