Talk:Immutable Strings

Revision as of 20:01, 18 April 2007 by Peter gummer (Talk | contribs)

Starting from scratch

While it is very galling that C# and Java should be better than Eiffel in this respect, I am afraid that starting from scratch isn't really an option. Almost all programs would be broken, and the cost of fixing millions of lines of code would be far too high.

--Peter gummer 06:00, 19 April 2007 (CEST) There may be a decent migration path that wouldn't break code. Consider the fact that Eiffel is about to embark on its Void-safety adventure: at first sight, this looks like the mother of all breaking changes, but they have a reasonable-looking plan that should avoid most of the pain. The case of mutable strings seems very similar: a common cause of runtime errors that can be fixed by reversing the current behaviour. I think it's worth considering. All of the other options, with the exploding number of variations of strings (don't forget UC_STRING, etc.) and their conversion routines look much more scary to me.