Re: Lua 5.1 (work1) now available

[David Burgess <dburgess@...>]

I agree with Philippe that (for me) the one thing Lua misses is
a large string buffer class.


On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 11:58:39 +0200, Philippe Lhoste <philho@gmx.net> wrote:
> Eric Tetz wrote:
> > Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
> >
> >>- there are several other small changes
> >
> > What I've found (by comparing _G in 5.0 vs 5.1):
> >
> > Removed:
> >    io.popen
> >    arg.n
> >
> > Added:
> >   _PATH
> >      New name for LUA_PATH (now deprecated) used by 'require'
> >
> >   string.reverse (s)
> >     returns a reversed copy of string 's'
> [snip]
> 
> This one is very strange...
> Can somebody give me a real-world use case where this function is so
> useful that it needs to go in a standard library? I can't think any
> practical use myself. Perhaps it is a temporary test function?
> 
> I would rather see a string buffer library added to the standard
> library. One that would allow building large strings without hashing and
> perhaps GC overhead, allowing direct read/write of bytes in arbitrary
> addresses within the string size, automatic growth of buffer (or not), etc.
> 
> Unless somebody really convinces me that the table approach is almost as
> memory efficient and hashing can't be avoided anyway because Lua does it
> on every string it sees...
> 
> (If I do:
> x = string.sub(largeStr, i, j)
> f:write(x)
> x = nil
> does x is being hashed?)
> 
> I dream of such library for quite a long time (since Roberto did his LTN
> about string concatenation efficiency) and discovered later that it
> exists in Java (and probably on a number of other languages with high
> level string processing).
> 
> I would write it myself, but never got time to start it...
> So would it be useful at all?
> 
> --
> Philippe Lhoste
> --  (near) Paris -- France
> --  Professional programmer and amateur artist
> --  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
> --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
> 



-- 
db