2008/1/28, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>:
> Hi All,
>
>     having just stumbled across the fact that only characters with codes
> from 0 to 255 are unique I wondered whether anyone has considered doing the
> following:
>
> Character addClassVarNamed: 'LargeCodeCharacters'.
>
>
> Character class methods for class initialization
> initialize
>     [LargeCodeCharacters := WeakSet new
>
>
> Character class methods for instance creation
> value: anInteger
>      "Answer the Character whose value is anInteger."
>
>      | theCharacter existingInstanceOrNil |
>      anInteger <= 255 ifTrue:
>          [^CharacterTable at: anInteger + 1].
>      theCharacter := self basicNew setValue: anInteger.
>      ^(existingInstanceOrNil := LargeCodeCharacters like: theCharacter)
>          ifNil: [LargeCodeCharacters add: theCharacter]
>          ifNotNil: [existingInstanceOrNil]
>
>
> Yes this has the potential to create a lot of space overhead, but only for
> artificial codes that enumerate over all characters.  I suspect that for
> most cases the actual set of active characters would be quite small.
>
> (Alternatives that are indexed by integers might also work well, e.g. a flat
> WeakValueDictionary that used a WeakArray for its values).

Lord no, please no more Weak* collections. That was one of the major
performance fixes we did in Seaside, kicking Weak* collections. They
don't scale, they kill you in production.

Cheers
Philippe