At 7:34 AM -0700 7/10/02, John Porter wrote: >Florian Haeglsperger wrote: >> But isn't this partly addressed with COW? >> . . . >> Thus I don't see a very big performance win in introducing mutable >> strings. > >Good point. > >But some people maintain that there could be a need for truly >"constant" strings, that should never be modified, and any >attempt to do so, even under COW, should fail.
Right. COW is a performance hack--there's a difference between "I defer getting a private copy" and "This isn't changeable". It's reasonably important to have both. I'm not sure that the place to enforce read-onlyness is at the string/buffer level. Doing it at the PMC level is more likely the right place to do it. -- Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk