NAME
	pike_string - internal pike shared strings

DESCRIPTION
	This is the internal type for representing pike strings. They have
	ref counts and they are shared though a global hash table. The C
	type is a struct pike_string that has two public members: str and
	len. str is an array of char which contain the actual string. It
	is guaranteed that the string is null terminated, but the string
	can also contain zeroes before the end. len is of course the
	length of the string. Since strings are shared you may _never_
	modify the contents of a string, except for adding/subtracting
	references when approperiate. The only exception to this is when
	creating a new shared string with begin_shared_string which has
	not yet been linked to the hash table with end_shared_string.

KEYWORDS
	internals
