I put “Bob” is strictly my name in the message box and got false. But then i
tried “Bob” is my name and ALSO got false! Is that a bug?? 🤭
Sent from my iPhone
> On Sep 1, 2023, at 10:24, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode
> <use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>
> On 2023-09-01 17:44, Paul Dupuis via use-livecode wrote:
>> I may just be experiencing a brain fart, but I have read the release notes
>> several times, and I don't understand the purpose of the new:
>> is strictly a name
>> operator? Can someone explain its purpose in really basic terms or examples?
>
> Its purposes is so that it is possible to tell when a value is a 'name'
> rather than a 'string' when the distinction is important. The cases where
> this is true are few and far between - indeed, the use-case it was added for
> was so that the exact runtime type of constant values generated when parsing
> script (e.g. from constant initializers) is preserved.
>
> There are two kinds of strings internally - strings and names. All names are
> strings, but not all strings are names.
>
> The difference is that there is only ever one instance of a name with a given
> string in memory - e.g. if two variables hold a name whose string is "foo",
> then they will hold the same pointer.
>
> As to what names are - they are an optimization for cases where the engine
> will often do comparisons between them.
>
> Names are implemented in a global hash table in such a way that caseless and
> case-sensitive comparisons are constant time (when both values being compared
> are names).
>
> The keys of an array are names - which means the engine never has to compare
> the actual characters of a key in an array as it does a lookup.
>
> Literals in scripts are stored as names - so if you have 100 instances of the
> string constant "foobar" throughout all your scripts as literals - there will
> only actually be one instance of "foobar"
>
> Similarly, internally, object names, handler names and variable names are all
> stored as, well, names (again - because they are commonly compared against
> each other).
>
> Some examples of where you can observe a name are:
>
> put "foo" is strictly a name => true
>
> put ("foo" & empty) is strictly a name => false
>
> repeat for each key tFoo in { "foo": true }
> put tFoo is a strictly a name => true
> end repeat
>
> There might be a few other places where you could see a name rather than a
> string, but as mentioned above - its unlikely that 99.9% of people would ever
> need to worry about it :)
>
> Warmest Regards,
>
> Mark.
>
> --
> Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
> LiveCode: Build Amazing Things
>
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