Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!mcnc!rti!rcb From: rcb@rti.UUCP (Random) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Cost of strlen Message-ID: <2319@rti.UUCP> Date: 24 Jun 88 13:20:48 GMT References: <901@td2cad.intel.com> <3061@rpp386.UUCP> <2314@rti.UUCP>Reply-To: rcb@rti.UUCP (Random) Distribution: na Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC Lines: 18 In article webber@porthos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes: >The wonders of CISC. Were they inline compiling the strlen refs? It >is hard to imagine it paying to make the function call. After all, >how long is the average string anyway? And if they are so long, do >you really want to be copying them all over the place (rather than >building ptr structures to represent concatenations - maybe even >keep the lengths in the structure with the pointers The concept of keeping the length and pointers in a structure (ala VMS string descriptors) has been brought up. The code was originally developed on Unix machines and a VMS 750 where this was not a problem. Now it would require drastic changes to about 100,000 lines of code. Not a plesant prospect. -- Randy Buckland (919)-541-7103 Research Triangle Institute rcb@rti.rti.org [128.109.139.2] {decvax,ihnp4}!mcnc!rti!rcb