is strictly a name

[Bob Sneidar]

I put “Bob” is strictly my name in the message box and got false. But then i tried “Bob” is my name and ALSO got false! Is that a bug?? 🤭

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 1, 2023, at 10:24, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2023-09-01 17:44, Paul Dupuis via use-livecode wrote:
>> I may just be experiencing a brain fart, but I have read the release notes several times, and I don't understand the purpose of the new:
>> is strictly a name
>> operator? Can someone explain its purpose in really basic terms or examples?
> 
> Its purposes is so that it is possible to tell when a value is a 'name' rather than a 'string' when the distinction is important. The cases where this is true are few and far between - indeed, the use-case it was added for was so that the exact runtime type of constant values generated when parsing script (e.g. from constant initializers) is preserved.
> 
> There are two kinds of strings internally - strings and names. All names are strings, but not all strings are names.
> 
> The difference is that there is only ever one instance of a name with a given string in memory - e.g. if two variables hold a name whose string is "foo", then they will hold the same pointer.
> 
> As to what names are - they are an optimization for cases where the engine will often do comparisons between them.
> 
> Names are implemented in a global hash table in such a way that caseless and case-sensitive comparisons are constant time (when both values being compared are names).
> 
> The keys of an array are names - which means the engine never has to compare the actual characters of a key in an array as it does a lookup.
> 
> Literals in scripts are stored as names - so if you have 100 instances of the string constant "foobar" throughout all your scripts as literals - there will only actually be one instance of "foobar"
> 
> Similarly, internally, object names, handler names and variable names are all stored as, well, names (again - because they are commonly compared against each other).
> 
> Some examples of where you can observe a name are:
> 
>   put "foo" is strictly a name => true
> 
>   put ("foo" & empty) is strictly a name => false
> 
>   repeat for each key tFoo in { "foo": true }
>     put tFoo is a strictly a name => true
>   end repeat
> 
> There might be a few other places where you could see a name rather than a string, but as mentioned above - its unlikely that 99.9% of people would ever need to worry about it :)
> 
> Warmest Regards,
> 
> Mark.
> 
> -- 
> Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
> LiveCode: Build Amazing Things
> 
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