bug#18522: 24.4.50; mapcar is very slow

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> (defsubst parse-time-string-chars (char)
>>   (save-match-data
>>     (let (case-fold-search str)
>>       (cond ((eq char ?+) 1)
>>          ((eq char ?-) -1)
>>          ((eq char ?:) ?d)
>>          ((string-match "[[:upper:]]" (setq str (string char))) ?A)
>>          ((string-match "[[:lower:]]" str) ?a)
>>          ((string-match "[[:digit:]]" str) ?0)))))

[...]

> Yes, weird.  And even if someone thought of using
> parse-time-string-chars in other places that don't necessarily
> downcase the string, I don't understand why we should test a character
> by making it a string, then matching against [:upper:].  Maybe I'm
> missing something.

No, that's also rather puzzling.  Looking at the rest of the code, we
don't really handle anything other than [a-z] and [0-9] here, so using a
regexp instead of a (<= ?0 char ?9) (etc.) also seems odd.  And losing
those `string-match' calls would also mean we could get rid of the
`save-match-data' call.

I think I'll put together a test harness for `parse-time' and then clean
up this function further.

-- 
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   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no