Re: Proposal: "smarter" set operations that take size into account for speed

[Stephen C. Gilardi]

On Jan 23, 2009, at 3:23 PM, Jason Wolfe wrote:

OK, if these are not wanted in core right now, will anyone sign off
for adding them to clojure.contrib?

I can't say I like the idea of having two sets of functions that do
exactly the same thing, but ... sometimes you just don't want things
to run ~1000 times slower than they should.

Hi Jason,

Thanks very much for all your recent thought, work, and postings.







        (ns my-ns
           (:use [clojure.set :exclude (difference)]
                    [clojure.contrib.set :only (difference)]))





Thanks,

--Steve

I think it makes sense for clojure-contrib to be much more agile in accepting new, experimental, and incrementally improved code than Clojure proper. Things in contrib are always optional for end users so contrib can be quite welcoming to any high quality code without giving anyone much pain. One thing we may need to look out for over time is the namespace getting crowded, but we have a whole hierarchy under clojure.contrib to work with. We can manage that issue. I'll be thinking along those lines when responding to issue requests for contrib going forward. For changes to clojure that can possibly be implemented as a lib, clojure-contrib is the right place to get them some visibility. They may stay a contrib forever, or they may at some point move to Clojure itself. In either case, they will be easily available to Clojure programmers. Please add the improved set operations you've proposed as an "enhancement request" issue for clojure-contrib. I suggest you come up with a clojure-contrib.set lib that includes all changes you'd like to see. Users can easily use clojure.contrib.set rather than clojure.set to try them out. Features of "ns" even allow an end user to pick and choose set operations at the individual function level if that fine grained control is desired. One could even make a custom lib that picks and chooses and re-exports functionality from existing libs using clojure.contrib.def/defalias. If anyone has a pending issue request for clojure-contrib they'd like approved, please make a fresh posting to the thread where the proposal was discussed and perhaps change its subject to include a banner like "[Issue Request]" I'll try to help get our pending issue request count for clojure-contrib down to zero (and keep it hovering there).

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