Re: List container strawman 1.3

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3C0E1FA1.45A38A75@brighton.ac.uk>, John English says...
>
>Ted Dennison wrote:
>> The other issue is that this version won't actually compile as-is under Gnat.
>> (!) Every routine with both List and Iterator types complains that it can't
>> dispatch on both types. Frankly, I'm not sure I want it dispatching at all. I'd
>> think that since the user's view at this point is simply a private type, then
>> these routines would not be created as tagged primitives.
>
>Why does the iterator type need to be controlled? What's your mental
>model of what an iterator consists of? Mine generally says that an

An iterator doesn't but a *safe* iterator does (as the list needs to know when
its iterators go away). Perhaps I should have given this bit more fanfare, but
this strawman version is using the fully-safe iterator approach. That rounds out
the list of approaches used nicely. 

I think from a user-perspective it isn't a big change. The main change is that
you no longer have to provide a list with the iterator for every op, which has
to be viewed as an improvement. From an implementation perspective it
complicates things a bit, but I don't think its fatal to real-time use anymore,
which was my main concern. 

I've now provided an example of each kind of iterator. We need to make a
decision on this issue.

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T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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