[OT] Finding longest documents

[Benji Smith]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Benji Smith wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Christopher Wright wrote:
>>>> Containers as value types is such an idiotic idea for precisely this 
>>>> reason.
>>>
>>> I'd say this statement reflects a lack of understanding of value 
>>> types, rather than value containers are an idiotic idea.
>>
>> I'll bite.
>>
>> Why is it a good idea that containers are implements as structs?
> 
> As the Mexican would say: why not?

Well... here are a few reasons why not:

Structs can't implement interfaces, and a collection API is the 
poster-child of good interface usage.

Structs can't inherit from abstract classes. A good deal of 
functionality in a collection class can be implemented once in an 
abstract base class, making it simpler for subclass authors to implement 
the API without duplicating a bunch of boilerplate.

Conceptually -- and there's no hard and fast rule about this -- structs 
usually either represent small logically-atomic values (DateTime), or 
some fixed-size collection of logically-atomic values (Vector3). Using a 
struct as an arbitrarily-sized container seems, on the face of it, to 
break those conventions.

--benji