Re: labeling of trees (was: Re: [Texmacs-dev] Cache profiling of TeXmacs 1.0.3.9)

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Fri, 21 May 2004, David MENTRE wrote:
> Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden> writes:
> > Yes, this should certainly be considered sometime. In fact,
> > we might use symbols instead of strings as the labels of all trees.
> > That would make compairison much faster, even though usual string
> > operations like << on labels would become slower.
>
> I'm not sure I'm understanding what I'm speaking about but wouldn't it
> possible to use a 32 or 64 bits counter as identifier.

Yes, that is the idea, together with the use of a hash table.
Although this would probably speed up most operations on trees,
it might nevertheless occasionally slow things down.
Before making such a change, it would therefore be important
to well identify places in the code where we operate on strings
in an inline fashion (like when we use the << operator).