Re: Container reqs

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

I've been hoping to find in this discussion some kind of "Least Common
Denominator" that would outline requirements for some minimal collection of
data structures & algorithms for a standard library. Slicing the scope down
to some minimal set of containers that might address - say - 80%? of the
garden variety usages would constitute A Good Start. (Personally, I think a
plain vanilla double ended list and map would take care of the bulk of
needs.) It can *always* get expanded into different variations and flavors -
not unlike what you see under Ada.Strings.

Getting overly ambitious about what should be required for a standard Ada
library is just going to guarantee that this discussion remains just a
discussion.

If you had:

generic
    type Item is private ;
package Lists is .....

and...

generic
    type Index is private ;
    type Item is private ;
    with function "<" (Left, Right : Index) return Boolean is <> ;
package Maps is.....

would this *maybe* take care of some really large percentage of the usages
of data structures? Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily handle all the more
interesting cases and it might not be task safe and it might not be useful
for realtime and a whole bunch of other objections. But for a *whole lot* of
uses, this might just be enough and it leaves plenty of room for things like
"package Realtime_Lists is" and "package Object_Oriented_Maps is" and so on.

If it isn't kept reasonably simple, it won't get done and/or it won't find
widespread acceptance. I'm thinking that a tree containing just the two
packages I outlined above (or some reasonable variant on that theme) might
just be simple enough, reliable enough and useful enough to make a start. If
that much got accepted, other variations could be added with time.

And we still don't know if any vendors would include it in their
distributions...

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:IKkB7.40160$ev2.47839@www.newsranger.com...
>
> Yes, but now we are talking about having multiple different libraries.
That is
> the exact situation we have now that everyone is decrying.
>
.