Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Re: [Caml-list] String to list to string

[Bardur A. <lis...@sc...>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 10:30:14AM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 11:22:48AM +0100, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> > If you mean that we should add  string -> char list and char list -> string
> > functions to ExtString well I'm not sure it's good. Representing String as
> > char arrays/list is probably the worst (look at C). The best way is to treat
> > theses caracters uniformaly.

> It's not all about performance at all costs though.

Agreed. Simply adding a note along the lines of

     Normally, using this function is a sign that you are doing something
     extremely inefficient, and you might want to consider another
     approach.
     
to the ocamldoc should suffice to alert users of possible inefficiency.  

Frankly, I don't think it's ExtLib's job to prevent users from doing
inefficient things, it should simply provide a more comprehensive
standard library. (ExtLib *itself* should obviously be as efficient as
possible).

> For me, most of the time I want to get something done, and speed simply
> doesn't matter
> - all the programs I'm writing at the moment spend 99.99% of their
> time waiting for a remote SOAP server to respond.

> > And BTW, it's possible to do the following :

> > List.of_enum (String.enum s)
> > String.of_enum (List.enum l)

Even so, I vote for adding functions for the direct conversions. I mean
if it's a FAQ entry it's probably something which is/would be used a lot,
right?

-- 
Bardur Arantsson
<ba...@im...>
<ba...@sc...>

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