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]
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