Suggestion: dynamic array operations

[Steve Horne]

On Thu, 07 Sep 2006 11:19:12 -0400, nobody <nobody at mailinator.com>
wrote:

>So what sort of silly stuff would you write about possible benefits derived from 
>having a list data structure built into the language?

There's already a built-in type for the links. It's called 'pointers'
;-)

There's just too many ways to do a linked list. Singly linked. Doubly
linked. Circular or with a clear start and end. Do you want separate
whole-list and iterator classes, or do you want to package the two in
a single class (as with a stack).

Bidirection lists implemented with a single link per item are fairly
cool, even though the iterators are a bit of a pain - each link is the
XOR of the previous and next item addresses, and the iterator needs
two adjacent item addresses. Needs a custom allocator to get the
benefit, but still good for listing very small items.

Picked it up from a website by an ex-Microsoft employee, IIRC. He used
address differences for the links, but XOR is a tad easier IMO.

A small set of built-in complex types is good, but libraries and
templates exist for a reason. If a standard library list type gets
really heavy use, it can always be absorbed into the language later.

Mind you, I guess a complex list-type specification might have
benefits along the lines of...

  list!(item-type, link-style, separate-iterators-flag, ...)

But templates can do that. And anyway, lists are naff! I like trees!

-- 
Remove 'wants' and 'nospam' from e-mail.