Re: List container strawman

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9sib27$13aeg3$5@ID-25716.news.dfncis.de>, Nick Roberts says...
>For a start, all this mularchy about insertion and deletion is just plain
>silly! It really is. You don't need them, and shouldn't implement them. Yes,
>really. Let me show you why.

I'm not sure I understand this. It looks like you are talking about having the
users manage the internal details of all their own data structures, to which my
first reaction would be "ewwwww.". I'll admit there may be some interesting
possiblities I don't see in this though.

>It also gives me another opportunity to demonstrate the idea of having a set
>of abstract container types, upon which operations (such as Normalize_Names)
>can be hung, thus freeing you of: (1) having to worry about which container
>type to use when writing the procedure; (2) the procedure shackling you to
>one particular container type. Do you turn away from this Utopia? ;-)

But remember that one of our stipulations is essentially "no multilevel generic
instantiations required". Does this work that way? Without that restriction you
could do all sorts of cool things, as has been done in Booch and others. In that
enviroment I'd say that we already have plenty of players, and one of them is
liable to be perfectly suitable (although I suppose more are always welcome). I
don't want to discourage you from making the ultimate container library. But for
the purposes of what we are doing here it has to be very easy to use, and
frankly I couldn't figure out quite what was going on in the code you presented.

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

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