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Re: on broken manpages, trolling, inconsistent implementation and the difficulty to fix bugs

From:
David Nicol
Date:
May 20, 2008 12:27
Subject:
Re: on broken manpages, trolling, inconsistent implementation and the difficulty to fix bugs
Message ID:
934f64a20805201227j502c15b6v924c4ac0bd86ed3f@mail.gmail.com
On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 7:10 AM, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1. We don't have a binary data type.  (We dont distinguish character
> data from octet data and its easy to inadvertently cause one to be
> treated as the other with surprising results.)

I have been for some time in favor of introducing a
string-of-characters data type which would be a tree of some kind
rather than a contiguous block.  So if new data is to be added to the
internal representation of character-data data type, please include
"make it a tree instead of a contiguous block" when considering
architecture options.  Advantages include:  concatenation without
copying;  cleaner lvalue substring semantics; the possibility of
internally compressing strings with lots of common bits in them; and
certainly more (especially after four cups of coffee, he
self-defeatingly blurted)



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