This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE unified container theory =head1 VERSION Maintainer: David Nicol <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 28 Sep 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 341 Version: 1 Status: Developing =head1 ABSTRACT Viewing Hash and Array as instances of "Container" leads to easy implementation of "Sparse Array" and "Sorted Hash" and "Real Array" =head1 DESCRIPTION There are two big differences between Hash and Array. =over =item Hash keys are string, and Array keys are Integer Hash keys are string, and Array keys are Integer =item Array semantics include listing keys which have not been assigned to yet. Array semantics include listing keys which have not been assigned to yet. This is really an issue for the accessing functions, not the underlying data. =item Curly braces mean look up by string, and square brackets mean look up by integer. maybe square brackets as the C<qr> delimiter would be a good way to indicate RFC197 regex semantics. Wouldn't that make for an easy way to take a slice from a collection of data points? =back =head1 IMPLEMENTATION With this in mind, it becomes possible to consider implementing both container types as sorted trees, possibly transparently switching to block offset arrays when Array is sufficiently dense. The one tree framework could be used for both types of trees, by switching the comparison function. Tree search may be faster than hash function calculation for easily compared data. =head1 REFERENCES The above is written from memory of conversation in August on perl6-internals.
