Re: [PATCH] Re: startup speed (or lack thereof)

[Gary Houston <ghouston at arglist dot com>]

> From: Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se>
> Date: 19 Mar 2000 19:35:20 +0100
> 
> I think line and column number information is very important.  I run
> in an Emacs-environment where this information is used to highlight
> the erring expression.  But also in the shell, I use both line and
> column numbers.
> 
> As I wrote in a previous letter, there is a solution, however:
> 
> Rewrite the reader to operate directly on the port interface,
> i.e. directly on the port buffer.  This way, line and column numbers
> can be updated much more seldom, *and* we'll gain extra efficiency
> because of not needing to call scm_getc per character.

That's how read-line works at present.  However doing any more of this
kind of thing now may be a premature optimisation, since the
interfaces will probably need to change if multibyte encodings are to
be supported.

Note that the SCM_INCLINE etc., macros could be simplified slightly by
taking an scm_port instead of an SCM as an argument.  I don't know
whether this would have any practical effect, since I can't measure
any difference in startup time with the line/column stuff removed.