Re: Standard Queue status

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3C065B15.5CA7D10B@boeing.com>, Jeffrey Carter says...
>
>Mats Karlssohn wrote:
>> Yes, the use of "Direction" is elegant, and converting to and from
>> unbounded arrays seems useful.
>
>I don't know. Specifying the direction seems like control coupling.

That's my problem with it exactly. Its nice to see I'm not the only classicly
trained software engineer here. :-)

I can usually get over such reservations if there is either some common code
inside, or if it makes the interface more useful (eg: can use it in a loop). I
don't think the latter will apply here, but the former might.

>unconstrained arrays is trivial to implement with the standard features
>of a list, so I'm not sure it should be in the basic package; on the
>other hand, I'm not sure it shouldn't be there if it's going to be
>defined at all.

What I was thinking was just simple to- and from-list conversion routines, and
some extra "&" functions using them as operands (but not products). Anything
more sophisticated than that should probably go into a Lists.Fixed package,
should we choose to make one.

>mainly by one's imagination. So the general rule should be something
>like: include the basic operations, operations that cannot be
>efficiently implemented without directly manipulating the
>implementation, and extremely common operations; exclude everything
>else.

Exactly.

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

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