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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: GNAT: Performance of String functions
Date: 1997/07/22
Message-ID: <dewar.869607817@merv>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 258207570
References: <dewar.869405750@merv> <EDnEIw.6ME.0.-s@inmet.camb.inmet.com>
 	<5qvdbn$pno$1@ratatosk.uio.no> <dewar.869545551@merv>
 <5r1l6e$e0h$1@ratatosk.uio.no>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-07-22T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


iTarjei said

<<A counted string would be equivalent to a bounded string with individual
maximum string length. All would be assignment compatible if the length of
the assigned string was equal or less to the maximum size of the destinatation.

I suspect bounded strings will perform badly against a counted string
implementation because assignment of strings involves copying the entire array
whether it contains valid data or not. This makes Ada less than wonderful in
applications that involve a lot of bounded string assignments.
>>

There is no reason that the implementation has to copy the entire string,
it may, but that is an implementation issue, not a language issue. In fact
what makes you think you know *anything* about the implementation of
bounded string from the RM, it is a private type.

You can make the above comment for some particular implementation of 
Ada, but your statement above, which phrases it as a comment on the
language is just plain incorrect.

You may be right that if there are aplications that involve a lot of
bounded string assignments (I have not seen any yet), and if the implementation
does full copies all the time, THEN for that implementation, there may
be a problemantic inefficiency.

Actually it makes perfectly sense to implement bounded strings in terms
of what you call counted strings. That's certainly the implementation
plan for GNAT. A side benefit of this approach is that then far less
of the implementation is generic.