Re: Internal Representation of Strings

"Tony" <tony@my.net> writes:


> What are some good ways/concepts of internal string representation?


One such pointer is this (old but valuable) paper by Paul Abrahams:


http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/60000/51610/p61-abrahams.pdf?key1=51610&key2=4789464321&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=21920990&CFTOKEN=76966469


The idea of having the length at the end of the string (and perhaps
pointing to that end also) has a certain appeal. You can even follow
your length field with a max size field to get a good solution for
mutable strings with lengths (crude monospaced ascii art below).


pointer-------------------V
|unused-space|chars....|0|length|max-size|
.^............^-----------+......|
.+-------------------------------+


There are, of course, more sophisticated representations, such as
"ropes" that may be appropriate.


I'm sure others will have interesting suggestions, and I'm as anxious
to learn them.


Hope this helps,
-Chris


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