the main purpose of the the symbol table is, as i understand it, to make string comparison super-fast (as there's no need to compare each character but just a simple address).

For example,

flagsym == gensym("-lib")

is my all means worse than

!strcmp(flag, "-lib")
 

looking at the code i see quite a number of places¹ where something like this is used:

The vast majority of the cases I've found are in settings/flag parsing.

First of all, these are not the performance critical parts of Pd and most of the strings in question are very short, anyway.

Secondly, for symbol comparison to make sense, you would have to create all those symbols upfront and store them somewhere. This would indeed pollute the symbol table and add many lines of extra code for no real benefit.

or should they just be replaced with symbol comparisions?

Christof

hi all,

Pd uses a symbol-table for practically all of its string handling.
the main purpose of the the symbol table is, as i understand it, to make string comparison super-fast (as there's no need to compare each character but just a simple address).

now, looking at the code i see quite a number of places¹ where something like this is used:

> strcmp(atom_getsymbolarg(i, argc, argv)->s_name, refstring);


what is the reason for this?
is it just out of habit (because in all the other projects you usually use strcmp())
or because this is an attempt to not pollute the symbol table needlessly?

or am i missing something?
or should they just be replaced with symbol comparisions?

gmsadr
IOhannes



¹ i've counted about 135 of such uses (automatically; so I certainly missed a few)

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