Hello everyone,
thans for your comments. (I'm just typing on my tablet so please apologise for some typos...)
I was thinking of the "counting without buffering" method myself, but then found just what you wrote in the last 2 replies - I couldn't directly have catered for , say, a sequence of equal characters in a row. Think of a "poor man's progress bar" out of a couple of dots, followed by something else. I probably need to react to the correct number of dots only - think of a device startup that signals success or failure by such a thing.
So the last post looks like a solution, though I ha e not yet thorughly gone through it yet.
I have made other interesting experiments.So I swithced to "string" instead of "String" at that point, wrote a "shift left" rotuine of my own, and brought the time to shift a 20-char string left down from 200microsecs to about 50microsecs. In this context, I noticed how much faster a do...while loop can be over a for... loop .
I'll be back when I reviewed the suggested code fully.
Thanks again so far for all the suggestions. I think dropping Strings completely is a good thing, though I need to reprogram many comfort functions manually... will take some time.
all the best
stargar