🚀 go-pugleaf

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.