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Evaluation of String Types

• Supporting strings is an aid to readability and writability

• As a primitive type with fixed length, they are inexpensive to provide--why not have them?

• Dynamic length is nice, but is it worth the expense?

• Implementation:
  • Static length--compile-time descriptor
  • Limited dynamic length--may need a run-time descriptor for length (but not in C and C++)
  • Dynamic length--need run-time descriptor; allocation/deallocation is the biggest implementation problem