On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 12:10:35PM +0200, Loup Vaillant wrote:
> 2007/6/16, Alain Frisch <Alain.Frisch@inria.fr>:
> >Jon Harrop wrote:
> >> Any chance of changing the semantics of string literals so they aren't 
> >static?
> >[...]
> >If it were done automatically, there would be a penalty for
> >the common case of immutable strings; to avoid it, you'd need to lift
> >constant literals out of abstractions, which is not very nice.
> 
> By the way, why Ocaml didn't take the Java path, i.e. making truly
> immutable strings, And provide mutable string buffers as well? Any
> chance of seing someone exploring that path? (Some usefull features
> would then be fast consing and catenation, and some easier string
> sharing).

Mutable strings are useful!  - I can use them as bitfields, general
data areas (for ioctl, mlock), etc  See:
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/hvcalls/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat