On Tue, 10 Jun 1997 15:04:55 +0200 Frank Heckenbach heckenb@mi.uni-erlangen.de wrote:
The African Chief wrote:
As Pierre said: string comparison are less efficient than integer compares, and generally I think *internal* things (i.e. things that must only be read by computers, not by humans) should use integers rather than strings when there's no real need for strings. Resource files, AFAIK, are binary files, anyway, so what good would it be to have some strings scattered in them?
Resource files (at least Windows resource files) can also hold strings in string tables. Most Windows programmers cannot do without these string tables. How would you represent the strings with integers? You need to store the actual strings in the resource file.
That's something different! These strings (if I understood string tables correctly) are actually to be read (or typed) by humans.
Correct.
There's no question that they must be stored as strings (unless, of course, one intentionally wants to encrypt and/or compress them to make them unreadable in the binary).
True.
But e.g. the IDs of the strings would be numerical (just as they are in WinAPI/OWL, AFAIR).
True.
Would there be a problem if two or more programmers (unknown to each other) just happened to choose the same ID?
[...]
If different programmers really happened to choose the same ID, it could matter if they wanted to combine their sources (however, the compiler would (should) notice this, so they could change the IDs, and they'd just have to recompile everything once), or when they exchanged or shared data files with these IDs in them (which, however, seems strange unless the sources are combined, too).
Suppose they put their code in dynamic linked libraries (meaning that any application that can load functions from such libraries can use the code) ?
Best regards, The Chief Dr Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief, and the Great Elephant) Author of: Chief's Installer Pro v3.60 for Win16 and Win32. Homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/African_Chief/ E-mail: laa12@cc.keele.ac.uk