Why Strings as Classes?

[Dee Girl]

Christopher Wright Wrote:

> Dee Girl wrote:
> > I am confused to. Why is making [] do find good and making find do [] wrong? How do you make decision? To me it looks the opposite way. Because find is less demanding contract than []. In design a stronger contract can replace a weaker contract. Not the inverse. Thank you, Dee Girl
> 
> Choosing the data structure used is never the job of the code you're 
> giving the data to.

Yes. But code should refuse data if data does not respect an interface.

I think binary_search never should work on list. It does really bad thing when linear search is the correct thing. Do you think it should?

> It's the job of whatever creates the data structure. 
> By giving two functions where the only difference is performance 
> guarantees, you're allowing the called code to determine what data 
> structures it accepts, not based on the operations the structure 
> supports, but based on the performance of those data structures.

I do not think there is anything wrong. And for me performance and complexity is very different words. Performance is like dmd -O -release against dmd -debug. Or asm implementation of function. Complexity is very different thing and essential for algorithm.

> D's standard arrays are a bad example of this: since they're built in, 
> everyone uses them, so it's difficult to replace them with a linked list 
> or something else. The effect is more pronounced with associative 
> arrays, since there isn't as much choice in lists as in dictionaries. 
> But they're so damn useful, and the syntax is hard to match.

I hope Walter adds new data structure that work with std.algorithm. I am not sure. But I think std.algorithm is make so it works with other types. Not only arrays.