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From: Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 18:54:39 -0700
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Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:185386
Date: 2014-03-27T18:54:39-07:00
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On 03/27/2014 02:50 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
> After all, if storage space is not a concern, Wide_Wide_String is the most
> universal (and efficient) representation. It seems that it makes the most
> sense to do operations in terms of that type and convert for storage --
> since that's what will happen naturally most of the time. (Presuming you're
> not so American-centric that you don't care about anything beyond type
> String. :-)

I guess storage space is not a concern for Erlang. The string "ABC" is shorthand 
for the list [65, 66, 67], and apparently each "character" takes 8 bytes: 4 for 
the number, and 4 for the pointer to the next element in the list.

Using 4 bytes for the character is sometimes called support for Unicode.

Why not define Character as 32 bits and get rid of the Wide_ guys?

-- 
Jeff Carter
"My brain hurts!"
Monty Python's Flying Circus
21