Re:String types are fine. How about your code?
by alex_c on Thursday November 28, 2013 @12:16PM
(#6815406)
>It's not a problem we want every programmer solving anew for every program.
Yeah, I completely agree. You can make an argument that this stuff belongs in a library (or even several libraries) rather than the language, simply because of how many decisions are involved:
- do you know what language your search input is in? can it be any of several languages? any at all? only one specific language, ever?
- what language is the text you're searching on? do you know? are you potentially searching across text in multiple languages at once?
- how exact does the match need to be? do you want phonetic matches? do you want to match characters that "look" similar but many sound different?
- do you need a binary or a fuzzy match? (e.g. are you doing a search ranked by relevance). Do you need to compute some sort of Levenshtein distance?
So the use cases can range from a simple byte-level exact comparison all the way to a full search server like Solr. How much of that should the language implement? (not a rhetorical question, I actually don't think there's an obvious answer).
Yeah, I completely agree. You can make an argument that this stuff belongs in a library (or even several libraries) rather than the language, simply because of how many decisions are involved:
- do you know what language your search input is in? can it be any of several languages? any at all? only one specific language, ever?
- what language is the text you're searching on? do you know? are you potentially searching across text in multiple languages at once?
- how exact does the match need to be? do you want phonetic matches? do you want to match characters that "look" similar but many sound different?
- do you need a binary or a fuzzy match? (e.g. are you doing a search ranked by relevance). Do you need to compute some sort of Levenshtein distance?
So the use cases can range from a simple byte-level exact comparison all the way to a full search server like Solr. How much of that should the language implement? (not a rhetorical question, I actually don't think there's an obvious answer).
No arguments on the existing String methods :)