Re: [boost] [string] proposal

Subject: Re: [boost] [string] proposal
From: David Bergman (David.Bergman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-29 16:04:08

On Jan 29, 2011, at 3:53 PM, Phil Endecott wrote:

> Dean Michael Berris wrote:
> [snip lots!]
>> Does that make sense?
> 
> No, sorry.  I'm trying to decide whether
> 
> (a) You're describing general problems that I should know about but don't.
> (b) You're describing problems that apply to advanced architectures (NUMA) that I have limited experience with.
> (c) You're confused, and these problems don't exist at all.
> 
> Have you ever had the experience of talking to someone, maybe in a job interview, and thinking "this guy is either a genius or an idiot but I don't know which"?  That's what I'm getting here.  I hope that wasn't too honest!  Sadly, I don't have enough time to delve any deeper.

I have been trying to stay away from those waters. But... Dean: you do have a way of jumping here and there, a bit at random, pulling a straw here and another there. Why don't you (Dean, that is) just focus on proposing a really good immutable (or partially immutable...) byte sequence type and we see where we go from there?

Trying to either convince people that most text handling (on top of such a byte-based sequence type) would benefit from the immutability, performance- or concurrency-wise or that this byte sequence type is somehow entangled with text handling will either fail or confuse and subsequently fail.

Being an old FP aficionado (currently working mostly in Clojure, actually), I welcome immutable types. But as Steven Watanabe pointed out, your structure is only partially immutable; I can't remember anymore, but I trust him there.

So: please go ahead and suggest an immutable_byte_sequence type and we might be able to (ab-)use it for a lot of cool stuff.

/David