The immutability of strings
 

Quick question...

Just having read through stuff recently and trying to be a little more concious of efficiency in my programs I wasn't sure about this.

I know that having the following

Actually creates two strings, and it's better to use stringbuilder class to do this type of thing.

However, does this


Create one or two strings? I would assume one, but you know what they say about assuming!

Re: The immutability of strings
 

It creates 3. One ("James"), two (" is testing this"), and a third to store the result ("James is testing this")

Nursing the efficiency of String vs. StringBuilder is often not going to get you much benefit. Of course, there are loops that are vastly improved by the change, but often it's easier to just use String.

Re: The immutability of strings
 

..not to mention that if efficiency is critical to your application, you should use a native (non=managed) language like C/C++.

Re: The immutability of strings
 

I guess someone had to say that :)

Re: The immutability of strings
 

Thanks for the info Jimbo, very useful, I had already played some with StringBuilder for the scrabble program just because having the number of string operations that I had (for 8!) was a HUGE overhead, changing to stringbuilder vastly improved performance.

Re: The immutability of strings
 

Efficiency isn't critical, but I like to try to program in an efficient manner, taking 10 seconds to do something that should take less than a second (if programmed in the same language) is bad practice.