Re: Why are strings linked lists?

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003, Graham Klyne wrote:

Following this debate, I find myself wondering if this is not something that might be optimized "behind the scenes" as a common case, rather than changing the computational model presented.

Argh, please, no! I find this kind of implicit optimisation can be very annoying. If you aren't relying on good performance, and it goes a bit faster than expected, that's great. But if you are relying on fast strings, you really don't want to be depending on the compiler optimising things... because you'll spend half your time trying to work out whether the optimisation has been applied, and if not, what change you made that meant that the compiler couldn't do the optimisation... N