>  I recently wrote some code that made use of char lists, and explode
>  and implode came in handy.  I needed to marshal a recursive datatype
>  into a packet to be sent over a communication channel according to a
>  protocol that imposed a specific format, including a length byte at
>  the beginning and a checksum byte at the end.
>  
>  I could have made one pass over the data to compute the packet length,
>  then a second pass marshaling it into a buffer.  But it was very
>  natural to just build up a list of bytes in a single traversal of the
>  datatype.  Then the length and checksum could easily be added to the
>  beginning and the end, and the result written out.

I had exactly the same code to write one year ago, and I simply built
the packet inside a buffer, with a 0 length-field, changed it to a
string, and filled the length-field just before sending, by changing
the chars in place in the string. It only allocates the buffer once,
and then the final string at the end, I cannot believe that using a
list of chars can be more efficient, but sometimes strange things
happen... 

- Fabrice

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