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From: cargo@TARDIS.CRAY.COM (David S. Cargo)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: table initialization
Message-ID: <9002012052.AA03270@zk.cray.com>
Date: 1 Feb 90 20:52:14 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
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I was looking at implementing some Icon code to initialize font width
tables.  Naturally I thought about using tables to do this.  I then
realized that while most other structures can be initialized with
constants, there doesn't seem to be a convenient way to do this with
tables.  Or is there something I'm missing.

What I will probably wind up doing is either using lists indexed by
character values (using ord(s)) or using two constant lists to
initialize a table, char_val and char_width are the two lists:

every i := 1 to n do width[char_val[i]] := char_width[i]

Eventually I'll probably want to know which is faster to use, a
character width table or and array indexed using ord(s))

string_width := 0 # for either case
every string_width +:= char_width[ord(!s)] # for a list
every string_width +:= char_width[!s] # for a table

It would seem to be a trade between ease of access and creation
of temporaries.

Has anybody tried anything like this already and found an answer
to which is better speed-wise?