Thanks for the lesson Bijan.

I've notice experimentation and exploration are very important in 
Squeak. It seems there can be magnitudes difference in results depending 
on how something is done.

Jimmie Houchin

Bijan Parsia wrote:
> On Wed, 15 May 2002, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> 
> 
>>My books are at home and I am having difficulty finding how to put two 
>>strings together.
> 
> 
> As two others have pointed out #, is the concat operator (not just for
> Strings, but for most collections).
> 
> Putting:
> 	'ab'.'bc'.'abbc'
> in the top left pane of the method finder and hitting reture will find
> this for you. (Yay method finder!!!)
> 
> 
>>In Python and I think other languages (I believe) I can do in Smalltalk 
>>form:
>>
>>a := 'StringOne'
>>b := 'StringTwo'
>>c := a + b
> 
> 
> Eww. Some people (me) sorta dislike overlading #+ that way :) (Yes, I use
> Python :))
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Important tip: concat is usually more expensive in Squeak than, say, in
> Python. Or rather, concat is not the preferred way to efficiently build
> large strings. E.g.,
> 
> 	'adfafds', 'adfdfa', 'adfa', 'adfasf'
> 
> will involve a fair bit of copying. A better way is to use a stream, and
> here's one of my favorite idioms for it:
> 
> 	String streamContents: [:strm | strm nextPutAll: 'adasfdaf';
> 					     nextPutAll: 'dafdak';...]
> 
> Disadvantage here is that you can still get a fair bit of copying, as the
> stream starts with a small collection and then doubles it at appropriate
> moments. To further tune you can do something like
> 
> 	WriteStream on: (String new: 1000).
> 
> Which will preallocate in the stream a collection of (at least closer
> to) the right size for a reasonably sized string.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bijan Parsia.