>>>hmmm, only used textmerge to get pretty printed SQL or other strings, but never measured it against traditional assignment.
>>>Even if it should employ only normal variable assignment, the style should help to eliminate memory thrashing via unneccessary temp variables/steps in between.
>>>Do you have reason to believe it employs something else like memory mapped files?
>>
>>I think it uses a series of strextract(), eval() and stuff() calls. While the last function was there since forever (I think I even saw it in Clipper 87), the other two were, I think, first internally used in textmerge as early as Fox 2.0. Then the gods saw that these were good, and made them public.
>>
>>When I see some of my old code, from the nineties, where I used \ and \\ for output into a file... it worked, was blazingly fast, and the code was a mess. Once we got text-endtext into a variable, I never used those clumsy things again. And I think assignment with all chopped pieces being put together is equally messy.
>
>for me the only antipattern is more than a handful of lines always adding to and reassigning the same result variable, especially if done in consecutive lines.
>Not relying on language specific things like \,\\ and textmerge for trivial code makes porting the code to another dialect or even language much easier and I encountered that often enough. So I decide on the probability that this code will be ported or used as a template for porting wether to use textmerge or single assignments spanning a dozen or more lines of string concatenation.

ISTR getting burned once by TEXTMERGE - I was maintaining some existing code and had to wrap one in other code. For readability I indented the TEXTMERGE which caused it to fail, I think because tabs were introduced. Any code which fails when indented by tabs is too fragile for me so I've never used it since. I think in that case I moved the TEXTMERGE to a separate routine/method with no wrapping/indentation and commented it to leave it that way.

I find when I'm building strings I like to be able to see the individual components, mainly for debugging. Doing that conventionally with assignments works well for me. How easy is it to see the contents of a TEXTMERGE in the debugger?