Mutable strings

[SBrunning at trisystems.co.uk]

> From:	Alex Martelli [SMTP:aleax at aleax.it]
> Hans-Joachim Widmaier wrote:
> 
> > I don't think strings are immutable because they ought to be that way
> > (e.g. some CS guru teaches that "mutable strings are the root of all
> > evil"). They're immutable because they allow them to be used as
> > dictionary keys. And it was found that this doesn't affect the
> > usefulness of the language too much.
> 
> Wrong.  Consider Java, even back from the very first version: it had
> no dictionaries on which string might be keys, yet it still decided
> to make its strings immutable.  This should make it obvious that the
> interest of using keys as dict keys cannot possibly be the sole
> motivation for the decision to make strings immutable in a language.
> Rather, the deeper motivation is connected to wanting strings to be
> ATOMIC, ELEMENTARY types, just like numbers; and to lots of useful
> practical returns of that choice.  All you lose is the "ability" to
> "confuse" (type-pun) between strings and arrays of bytes in many
> situations, but that's an ability best lost in many cases.  It's not
> an issue of "evil" -- a close-to-the-hardware low-level language
> like C has excellent reasons to choose a different, close-to-HW
> semantics -- but in a higher-level language I think Python's and
> Java's choice to have strings immutable works better than (e.g.)
> Perl's and Ruby's to have them mutable.
 
I came across a good write up of this principle today -
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ImmutableValue>.

Cheers,
Simon Brunning,
http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/
--LongSig





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