On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Patrick Horgan <phorgan1@gmail.com> wrote:
On 01/26/2011 11:34 PM, Dean Michael Berris wrote:
So you're saying, utf8_string is not view<utf8_encoding> as far as I've already described it?
Exactly. Others have expressed repeatedly that they want a string with intrinsic encoding.
So isn't the encoding intrinsic in the view here? I don't get the difference. If you can use a view<...> in place of a string, what is the difference?
Really, if you read the recent discussions, you will see that we're really talking about the same thing: a data structure that knew the encoding somehow. That somehow is, and has been determined (and agreed upon already) already suitably modeled by a view<...> that takes a string for a suitable definition of string. Note that the string *has no encoding that is intrinsic to it*.
Yes. I understand clearly that you have been talking about that. Others talked about a string with intrinsic encoding.
Which I've already addressed with a view<...> template. What else do others want?
So Mr. Berris is saying right now, if you didn't see the point: your "utf8_string" is really just a typedef to view<utf8_encoding>. The only *reasonably efficient* way of achieving this view design is if you had immutable strings. The thread has already hashed out *why* mutable strings is a bad thing (performance and design-wise) for encoding-aware algorithms. I don't see why we need to go back to that *again*.
Me either. Of course the other discussion about strings with intrinsic encoding should be in another thread.
The title of the thread is [boost][string] proposal -- I don't see why it should be in another thread. Am I missing something?
At any rate feel free to convince me otherwise that immutable strings wouldn't be a good thing for encoding/transcoding/string-or-text-centric algorithms. ;)
Why on earth would I do that? They would be wonderful for many applications and as you said and I agreed to days ago, why would you want to pay an extra price for a mutable string when you didn't need one. Of course when you did need one you'd just use it.
I'd just like to see your thread as you began it, a discussion about the benefits of an immutable string. I particularly didn't like that it got hijacked to focus on how appropriate it would be for a string that represented a particular encoding. Of course that's something to think about but there's a lot more to the benefits of an immutable string than that, and you started off doing a good job of discussing it before you got distracted. I just want to see the discussions split again so in this thread discussions of all aspects of immutability vs mutability could be discussed. It seems now that you are only interested in discussing encodings and views. I wanted the discussion of immutability.
Right. So more to the point, the real thing I want to focus on is the immutable string. :) Although with the question about encoding, the answer is the view. :D HTH -- Dean Michael Berris about.me/deanberris