[fpc-devel] dominant short strings in compiler source

[Vincent Snijders]

Jonas Maebe wrote:
> 
> On 17 mei 2006, at 19:59, L505 wrote:
> 
>> What do you guys thing about the idea to implement what DEC Pascal  
>> and Extended Pascal
>> have - a 2 byte length ShortString (MediumString?), uprdade *some*  of 
>> the path related
>> ShortStrings to be MediumString[1000] instead of ShortString[255].  
>> For some situations
>> it would probably fix some problems immediately just by upgrading  to 
>> string[1000] or
>> even string[500].
> 
> 
> There is the basis of a "longstring" type in the compiler which does  
> that more or less, but it was never fully implemented, because nobody  
> cares/cared about it. And you'd still have to convert these  longstrings 
> to ansistrings and back every time you interface with  sysutils, which 
> would introduce extra overhead.

IMHO, longstring are wasteful for memory, having a fixed length string 
of 1000 for paths, which on my computer paths are less 100 chars.

Vincent.