On Sat, 22 May 2010 07:56:31 -0400, Michel Fortin
<michel.for...@michelf.com> wrote:
On 2010-05-21 22:55:16 -0400, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com>
said:
Walter Bright wrote:
If we can get anywhere close to that level of success with ranges and
containers, we should all be well pleased.
Mike Taylor has a phrase for that I think is well-coined: "impedance
matching",
defined as the work necessary to get one library module to work with
another
library module.
This makes me think about something.
In principle, I like the idea of containers being reference type. It
works well when passing a container to functions. But at the same time,
I despite it. By-reference containers forces you to have extra
indirections even when you don't need them, and you have to worry about
null. Sometime a value-type would be better, when creating more complex
data structures for instance:
class Channel {
private {
Array!Message inbound;
Array!Message outbound;
}
...
}
What's the point of having extra indirection here?
Scope class members should solve this. It's been thrown around forever --
essentially, you should be able to define that a class member's storage is
contained within the owner object.
a value-type node-based containers just don't work well -- it's too easy
to escape references, and too easy to accidentally duplicate the entire
node set when passing to functions. It works fine for arrays because the
array has a very simple structure -- data and length. And the length and
data are somewhat orthogonal.
-Steve
