On 13.02.13 02:09, Alexandre Vassalotti wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:

It's idiomatic because strings are immutable (by design, not because of
an optimization detail) and therefore concatenation *has* to imply
building a new string from scratch.

Not necessarily. It is totally possible to implement strings such they are immutable and concatenation takes O(1): ropes are the canonical example of this.

Ropes have been implemented by Carl-Friedrich Bolz in 2007 as I remember.
No idea what the impact was, if any at all.
Would ropes be an answer (and a simple way to cope with string mutation
patterns) as an alternative implementation, and therefore still justify
the usage of that pattern?

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