Re: [Groff] new string comparison?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> My 2p's worth; I'd be wary of adding yet another thing, especially
> one that is so similar to something that is already there.  I've
> never found the current comparision wanting and unless the speed
> increase helps an awful lot with slow documents I don't think it's
> worth the bloat.  Not bloat so much in the code sense, but in people
> having to know yet another thing.

Well, as told you in an earlier mail I'm working on a new version of
mdoc.  To improve readability, I've replaced numerical class values
with strings which means that I don't have tests like

  .if (\n[...] == 1)

but

  .if "\*[...]"macro"

This happens very often in the code; a quick test has shown that
numerical comparison is more than twice as fast as string comparison.
I haven't investigated yet (i.e., not written the code) whether my
proposal really gives a useful speed improvement.

> How often has it been asked for on the mailing list?

Not in the last three years :-)


    Werner