Re: Two wishes for Christmas

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <[email protected]> writes:

    Eric> Bernd Schoeller wrote:
    >> I think GOBO always tried to be better than EiffelBase, fixing
    >> its problems. All it does is to disarm a well-known trap when
    >> coding. I cannot imagine that people are relying on the fact that
    >> 'last_string' is the actual read buffer.

    Eric> My experience working on large Eiffel projects involving many
    Eric> developers is that people are often using things that we would
    Eric> have not imaging they would rely on. So I would not be
    Eric> surprised that somewhere some people rely on the fact that
    Eric> `last_string' is a buffer (if only for performance reason).
    Eric> So what I'll try to do in the first place is to try to
    Eric> identify all usage of `last_string' in the code I have access
    Eric> to in order to see the real impact of such a change.

The performance impact would be very ugly for some of my cases. I very
often rely on the fact that strings are not cloned.

And if this is changed, eposix has to change as well, and probably many
other libraries.

I'm afraid the situation will only further trip up students as they will
be seeing a lot of last_string_buffer in actual code because it has to
perform and use GBs of memory, and mimic that.

I think education is the goal here: don't clone your strings. The
problem is people coming from Pascal/Java backgrounds where strings have
different behaviour. No one would expect last_some_class to be a twin.

Learn to live with it.

-- 
Cheers,

Berend de Boer

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