Re: string vs list processing

[Michael Livshin]

address@hidden (Bill Gribble) writes:

> Be smart about when you call string operations.  In Gnucash, we use
> guile to assemble multi-megabyte HTML documents.  You can't go around
> string-appending every "<" to "p>" to construct this size string; the
> garbage you generate is ridiculous.  You will get much better
> performance if you cons up a list of component strings, reverse it at
> the end, and apply string-append to the whole list.

yup.  even better (well, conceptually at least), keep your HTML
document as a tree of elements.  and print it out by walking the tree.
looks nicely structured when pretty-printed, too.

[ note: all this is not to say that Guile's string operations are
  extremely efficient.  but IME most problems that call for fast
  string operations turn out to be better much solved by different
  means. ]

-- 
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                -- Michael A. Petonic