🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DCLDB9.ArI@cunews.carleton.ca> dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll) writes:
>From: dfs@doe.carleton.ca (David F. Skoll)
>Subject: Re: STRING_CONSTRUCTOR limits strings to 512 byte
>Date: Mon, 31 Jul 1995 17:45:09 GMT

>In article <3viuuv$dcl@news.rwth-aachen.de>, Peter Haumer
>(haumer@informatik.rwth-aachen.de) wrote:

>> The macro STRING_CONSTRUCTOR in _string.c limits the size of strings to 
>> 512 bytes. I don't think that this is necessary. Does anybody know, why it
>> is is implemenented in this way? 

>Because it's implemented incorrectly.  Even worse, "512" is hard-coded.
>It should be a macro, at least.

>> There should be at least an assertion for a precondition or a size check 
>> in the macro. Programs which want to construct longer strings with varargs
>> just crash/core dump.

>The only *portable* way (other than writing one's on sprintf-like
>function) to handle very long strings is to write them to a file (with
>vfprintf...) and then read the file back into memory.  The
>sprintf... functions have no provisions for checking buffer overflow,
>which makes checking the precondition very difficult.

>A nicer solution, IMO, is for LEDA authors to define left-shift
>operators like this:

>string & string::operator<<(int i) { ... }
>string & string::operator<<(double d) { ... }
>etc...

>Then you could say:

>string s;
>int a=4, b=6;
>s << a << " times " << b << " equals " << a*b;

>which would append to s.  This is type-safe and more "C++-like".

>--
>David F. Skoll
><a HREF="http://www.doe.carleton.ca/students/dfs/">
>Click here for my home page</a> "Query two pi" on typewriter.

The latter suggestion is actually implemented in classes strstream and 
ostrstream. Being part of the C++ standard library, they are probably 
preferable to building your own string extensions for this purpose.

Ron van der Wal.