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From: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: C string library?
Keywords: strings, C
Message-ID: <874@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: 8 Feb 91 19:47:03 GMT
Organization: Commodore Bueromaschinen GmbH, West Germany
Lines: 29

As a died-in-the-wool user of Basic (yes, AmigaBasic :-), who does
also a little in C by porting some of my Basic programs to C, I always
find it the most tedious thing to deal with strings. Well, I have
that article by Ralph Babel somewhere where he explains which
functions in C resemble which Basic string functions. But this doesn't
help with the principal problem of declaring and handling of dynamically
sized strings. You must know, in AmigaBasic a string can grow as big as
32 KB, and it is absolutely impossible to declare every C string by
default with 32 K elements.

Now it should be possible to have a set of functions which initialize
a memory area and allocate dynamically all my strings in that space
just as a Basic interpreter does. Plus a good and fast garbage collection.
And plus all the nice string functions that make Basic programming such
a fun. And if you would add further flexibility over the Basic approach,
then one could add dynamic growth of the whole string area, where you
in Basic once and for all must decide for a certain amount by CLEAR.

So, is there such a beast out there?

BTW: Converting Basic to C by hand isn't that difficult! Just take any
editor, do some global search and replace (":" --> ";", "IF " --> "if(",
"END IF" --> "}", and so on), and do some recoding on things like
OPEN or WINDOW, and you already have most of the work done. Worse is
it with such simple things like INPUT or INKEY$ :-(. Yes, AND strings.

-- 
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel  // E-Mail to  \\  Only my personal opinions... 
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany  \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk