Suggestion: dynamic array operations

[Steve Horne]

On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 10:51:32 -0700, Gregor Richards
<Richards at codu.org> wrote:

>Arrays are arrays, not lists.  You can abuse them into stacks, queues 
>and the ilk, but it's an inefficient use of memory.

Sorry for pedanting, but it's an inefficient use of CPU cycles, not
memory. Arrays are more memory efficient than linked lists - no
per-item pointers, and only a one-off malloc overhead.

Even for time, it depends on how big the stack/deque will get. For
small sizes arrays are a good choice. Realloc problems are minimised,
time to shift the items up/down is trivial, and there are cache
benefits to keeping the items in adjacent memory locations.

For large deques, what you really want is a list of small arrays. A
trade-off between the costs and benefits of both lists and arrays.
IIRC this is pretty much what std::deque does in C++. But even then,
pushing and popping on the small arrays is needed to implement the
full deque logic.

And of course, that large deque class could overload those operators
to allow the same syntax.

I just think methods are a better choice than operators for this.

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