Re: Where is String class?

[Ildar Mulyukov <ildar at faki-campus dot mipt dot ru>]

Another thing that MFC CString provides is direct access to its buffer.
Anyway thanx.

Ildar Mulyukov, student of DACR, MIPT (Moscow, Russia)
e-mail: ildar@faki-campus.mipt.ru, ICQ# 4334029

On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Joe Buck wrote:

> > On Apr  7, 1999, Ildar Mulyukov <ildar@faki-campus.mipt.ru> wrote:
> > 
> > > substitute MFC's CString class. As I can see "string" class from
> > > std/bastring.h has less functionality then I need.
> > 
> > I don't know what you get get with MFC's CString, but `string' is
> > Standard C++, likely to work with any C++ compiler, so it's probably
> > the way to go.
> 
> I occasionally must deal with MFC stuff.
> 
> The only things MFC's CString provides that string does not are:
> 
> - trimming of whitespace
> - case conversion
> - CString::Format
> 
> The first two are trivial to do yourself; the third lets you do
> sprintf-style conversion without risk of overflow and is nice to
> have.  Is that what you need?  It could be written as a non-member
> function, e.g.
> 
> void sprintf(string& buffer, const char* format, ...);
> 
> Our real problem is that we don't have stringstream in libstdc++ 2.
> 
> CString suffers from a common programming error that results in
> poor performance.  Consider the following code:
> 
> CString n_copies_of(const CString& foo, unsigned n)
> {
> 	CString tmp;
> 	for (unsigned i = 0; i < n; i++)
> 		tmp += foo;
> 	return tmp;
> }
> 
> This function is O(n^2), not O(n).  The reason is that each +=
> causes a reallocation and copy of the existing string.  Microsoft
> applications are full of this kind of thing (quadratic performance
> on tasks that can be done in linear time) -- on the other hand,
> we should be thankful, as it's created such a big market for high-end
> ix86 hardware. :-)
> 
> If you replace CString with string in the above function, the
> performance is O(n).
> 
>