On 05/27/2010 06:49 AM, Don wrote:
bearophile wrote:
Jonathan M Davis:
Well, I've never needed to do that particular operation on _any_
container, so it does strike me as weird regardless. I've basically
always been looking to remove a specific element or elements or to
remove the element at a specific location.
You have probably missed my other answer. But I can add some more.
That operation is common.
You use it every time you have a container that doesn't define a
deterministic order (like hash sets, hash associative arrays, and so
on) and you want to process and consume its items. In such collection
you can't ask to pop the last or first item because they are not
defined. So you pop out one randomly. I have used it many times in my
programs.
When is it better to do it that way, rather than just iterating over all
elements, and then completely empty the container?
(Just curious -- I'm having trouble thinking of a use case for this
feature).
Again, any worklist-based algorithm will remove and add work items
without minding for a specific order.
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp00/cse231/report/node12.html
Andrei
