Copy a string: Difference between revisions

This task is about copying a string. Where it is relevant, distinguish between copying the contents of a string versus making an additional reference to an existing string.

Factor strings are mutable but not growable. Strings will be immutable in a future release.

"I'll be a string somdaysomeday."

Forth strings are generally stored in memory as prefix counted string, where the first byte contains the string length. However, on the stack they are most often represented as <addr cnt> pairs. Thus the way you copy a string depends on where the source string comes from:

In Pop11 normal data are represented by references, so plain assignment will copy references. To copy data one has to use copy procedure: