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From: olorin@world.std.com (Mark J Musante)
Subject: Re: [Inform] list_together problems
Message-ID: <DrG8px.Isy@world.std.com>
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
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Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 13:41:57 GMT
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Gareth Rees (gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk) wrote:
> Mark J Musante <olorin@world.std.com> wrote:
> > How trivial/complex a task would it be to have Inform re-use
> > strings?  Sounds like a useful optimisation.
> There are (admittedly rather contrived) occasions when you might want
> Inform not to reuse strings.  For example, if you had two separate
> groups of items with the same `list_together' string.
>
> Or you might have written a function like
>
>    Message("This string appears the first time the function is called.",
>            "This string appears on all other occasions.");
>
> which works by remembering the packed address of the first string in an
> array.  Then you would need to guarantee that each call to `Message' had
> a different packed address, even if the strings were the same.  See for
> example Chris Forman's MST3K-ing of "Detective" (implementation of the
> `Quip' function by yours truly).

I see.  In that case, one could always implement it as a compiler switch.

 - Mark
