Re: List container strawman 1.1

[Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com>]

Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> A reason to include the list with the Position is so you can ensure that
> the user is not by accident using a pointer to a different list than
> desired, but it's more commonly done so you can adjust the list's first
> or last pointer if the first or last node is deleted.

My thought was that it would be better to keep a pointer to the list in
the "iterator". That is, each iterator can only refer to one list
(except for the "off the end" iterator which I feel is a bad design
here), so why not?

You're not ensuring that the person isn't accidentally using the wrong
list. You're just making them say which list they think they're using,
and passing the right pointer but the wrong list isn't going to be
detected anyway. I.e., it's actually bad, because if you pass the right
pointer and the wrong list, and you try to delete the first record,
you'll get a different kind of failure than if you try to delete the
record in the middle. Better to always delete from the wrong list than
to sometimes delete from the wrong list, I think.

-- 
Darren New 
San Diego, CA, USA (PST). Cryptokeys on demand.
     Sore feet from standing in line at airport
                 security checkpoints: Jet Leg.