On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Matus Chochlik <chochlik@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Yakov Galka <ybungalobill@gmail.com> wrote:
Why not just call it boost::rope then? Its implementation will be a rope
(almost certainly) and no-body here has to remain compatible with SGI.
I believe that some people might object to that. The original rope has a different interface than Dean proposes.
Rope is not bad, it's actually shorter than 'chain'. I don't remember though whether the SGI rope implementation implied immutability. I know it uses concatenation trees of immutable substrings and substring operations rely on maintaining a reference to the original string. Somehow though I think it exposes a similar API to std::string and thus had to compete with it in terms of "mutability" by creating new chunks copying the modified chunks into new storage (and re-creating the concatenation tree). It also had some balancing algorithms implemented which I think could be addressed in a different manner. So the interface I was thinking about (and suggesting) is a lot more minimal than what rope or std::string have exposed. I think when I do finish that design document (with rationale) it would be clear why I would like to keep it immutable and why I would prefer it still be called a string. Let me finish that document -- expect something over the weekend. :) -- Dean Michael Berris about.me/deanberris