Re: zero containing strings

[David Jeske <jeske@...>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 1998 at 01:46:43AM -0300, Dan Marks wrote:
> Another thing is that I noticed that in lua when lua_getstring()
> is called, it seems to make a copy of the string that is retrieved,
> even if that string is in a variable that is passed as a parameter.
> I tried to change the value of a string by directly writing to
> the string but the changes do not take effect.  Is this true,
> and if so, will there be a way to retrieve strings by reference,
> so they don't have to be copied (and possibly could be modified
> in place?).  Some strings would be rather long, and it would
> good to avoid copying them excessively, and also it would be useful
> to use a string as preallocated space to store information.

Lua has one global string table. If you modified a string in place you
wouldn't necessarily know all the places it would take effect. For
example, if you happened to modify a string which contained "draw" you
would end up changing the string lookup of any "draw" method names
contained in tables.  (Someone please validate that this is correct)

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net