World: r3wp

You touches some problem, I have, with remembering the difference 
between FORM and TO-STRING. I can't remember what these produce:
form [1 2 3]
to-string [1 2 3]

I have to try it. You have good points. What do you see as the arguments 
to both have = and == in REBOL?

at the low level does the REBOL length? function sequentially calculate 
string data when it is called to determine length or does it instead 
access a memory location ot retrieve the current length of a string?

Based on its speed characteristics, I would say that the length is 
tracked in the string and just accessed by LENGTH?.

length is read not calculated

Ok, that is what I thought Brian.

The actual implementation is not know. But given REBOL strings are 
not null terminated, it seems most likely a length is help.
A glance behind the curtain here:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-message.r?m=rmlTGVC

I didn't see anything addressing it at that link but I assume you 
mean somewhere in that thread.

uh ? IIRC strings are null terminated in R2

Good conversation though.

Steeve, you can put ^(00) in strings in R2 and R3. They get converted 
to null-terminated for calling C routines, but they aren't internally.

But sticking to R2 and putting aside conversion to c routines, are 
you saying that R2 doesn't terminate strings with null?

hum... internally, strings are null terminated, i don't know the 
use, but it's a fact

Yes.

Steeve, have you disassembled REBOL?

not fully

some parts

Well the use for terminating the strings would be for determining 
length.  Otherwise you would have to determine length by updating 
the length value on each change of the string.

Which is what I hope is that case actually.

Paul, there are the two of them: length is stored, but strings are 
null terminated

iirc

Steeve, you can put nulls in the middle of strings and their length 
doesn't change. Thus, not null terminated.

i know it's not used, but really i saw nulls at the end of strings

They may have nulls tacked on the end after the tail of the string 
for C compatibility, but REBOL doesn't use them.

i agree

Is there another form of termination that might not be nulls that 
REBOL uses?

Otherwise length? would be O(n), and my testing has found it to be 
O(1) for avery series type except list!

REBOL uses something like Pascal strings with nulls tacked on the 
end for C compatibility. The length is tracked on write.

Well, if REBOL allocates storage for a string then there might be 
a maxlength value stored along with a length value.

Such that length? is returning current length.

A string use several slots of 16 bytes length.
by default, an empty string uses one slot (16 bytes).

If you define a string of 16 bytes length. then, the string uses 
2 slots because the null char at the end of the string can fit in 
the first slot.

*(can't fit)

They are continous slots of course

Are you referring to R2 or R3? R3's strings are different.

R2

Right.

I'm curious why your saying it is 16 bytes.

Strings are preallocated in multiples of 16 bytes, probably to simplify 
the GC.

Oh this is a REBOL thing.

all values in Rebol are chunked into slots of 16 bytes length

Got ya.

Seems a waste.

all series data type are using continuous slots

Memory management. Even the stack is a block.

I'm just thinkg of the memory storage.  It seems a waste from that 
persective.

we no that, it's a choice

*we know

speed vs memory

All memory management systems have a little waste. You have to balance 
the memory overhead versus the CPU overhead.

I'm not sure how it is faster.

its faster to handle blocks