[squeak-dev] Re: About String vs Symbols
Paolo Bonzini
bonzini at gnu.org
Wed Jul 30 16:02:04 UTC 2008
> Eliot, I read your answer and (like Colin probably) I didn't
> understand if you were speaking about immutable objects in
> Smalltalk, or of immutable strings (as in Java, where you have
> immutable java.lang.String objects and use java.lang.StringBuffer to
> obtain a restricted kind of mutability).
>
> So java strings are not really immutable but they don't provide a
> mutability API?
No, java strings are immutable (because they are in a final, i.e. not
inheritable class, and don't provide a mutability API).
A java.lang.StringBuffer object is substantially a mutable, growable
String even though it is 99% of the time used the same way as a
Smalltalk WriteStream. But the StringBuffer is not polymorphic with
Strings: sooner or later however you'll have to convert the StringBuffer
to a String to pass it to methods expecting a java.lang.String.
Paolo
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