Why Strings as Classes?

[Robert Fraser]

superdan wrote:
> yeppers. amend that to o(log n). in d, that rule is a social contract derived from the built-in vector and hash indexing syntax.

I see what you did thar -- you made up a rule you like and called it a 
"social contract". Whether it _should be_ a rule or not is debatable, 
but it is neither a written nor unwritten rule in use right now, so what 
you said there is a lie.

First, a hash access is already time unbounded. hash["hello"] where 
"hello" is not already in the hash will create a hash entry for hello. 
This requires heap allocation, which can take arbitrarily long. So 
having unbounded opIndex is in the language already!

Second, opIndex can be used for things other than data structures. For 
example, if I had a handle to a folder that had a file "foo.txt" in it, 
folder["foo.txt"] seems a natural syntax to create a handle to that file 
(which allocates memory = time unbounded). I can see the opIndex syntax 
being used for things like properties that may require searching through 
a parse tree. Maybe this is sort of stretching it, but I wouldn't mind 
having the opIndex syntax as a shorthand for executing database queries, 
i.e. `auto result = db["SELECT * FROM posts WHERE from = 'superdan']";`.

It's a shorthand syntax that makes no guarantees as far as complexity 
nor should it.