Re: GS_IS_WHITESPACE

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 24 Apr 2008, at 15:38, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On 23 Apr 2008, at 18:00, David Chisnall wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm looking in Foundation and finding a few cases where  
> > GS_IS_WHITESPACE is called, including one where I think there is  
> > inadequate testing that the whitespace bitmap is set up before  
> > using it (NSPropertyList:2581).  Is there a reason why GNUstep is  
> > using this non-locale-aware custom macro in a potentially unsafe  
> > way, rather than using the C standard (C90) isspace()?
>
> Sure, it's used where we must not do locale specific stuff ... ie  
> where the decision about what is (or is not) whitespace must NOT  
> alter with the locale set on the machine that the software is  
> running on.  Property list parsing is one of those cases where the  
> format is fixed  (and therefore a property list file is portable  
> between apps running in different locales).
>
> Why do you think it's unsafe?  The setup is done in the +initialize  
> method for the class, and that method is supposed to be guaranteed  
> (by the runtime) to have been executed before any other method of  
> the class is executed.  Did I miss something?

The code looks pretty inefficient though ... it wastes a lot of  
memory ... probably we should replace it with something that uses  
static 256 bit (32 byte) bitmaps since we are dealing with 8bit  
characters here.