Re: string vs list processing

[Neil Jerram]

>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Gribble <address@hidden> writes:

    Bill> Be smart about when you call string operations.  In Gnucash,
    Bill> we use guile to assemble multi-megabyte HTML documents.  You
    Bill> can't go around string-appending every "<" to "p>" to
    Bill> construct this size string; the garbage you generate is
    Bill> ridiculous.  You will get much better performance if you
    Bill> cons up a list of component strings, reverse it at the end,
    Bill> and apply string-append to the whole list.

So one could imagine a `lazy' implementation of string-append that did
this automatically.  With almost no thought, I guess that the issues
involved would be very similar to those for copy-on-write.

On the other hand, perhaps doing this would be to encourage bad
programming habits?

Regards,
        Neil