[Feature Request] Adding to D lang "set" built-in
Jonathan M Davis
jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sun May 6 23:23:16 PDT 2012
On Monday, May 07, 2012 07:05:28 Russel Winder wrote:
> I wonder if the tradition of exposing HashMap and TreeMap was a
> disservice by C++ and Java? Map and Set are programmer level concepts.
> Where there are algorithmic issues that require knowing about trees or
> has tables then the programmer is not working at the map or set level.
???
There are multiple ways to implement a set or a map. If a programmer knows
their data structures (as one would hope that they would), then they know the
difference between a hash set and a tree set (or hash map and tree map), and
they'll pick the one that's most appropriate for what they're doing. And
because the containers are very similar, it should be quite possible in many
cases to replace one with the other quite easily - especially if you're using
templates. That's one of the reasons that Java has the Set interface with
HashSet and TreeSet implenting it.
std.container is designed with the idea that containers will be named after
their data structures and _not_ what they're used for. Programmers can then
select the data structure that best serves their purposes. And I'd be worried
about any professional programmer who didn't know that you can use a red-black
tree as a set or a map.
> And the programmer has no control over how D's associative arrays work.
It's clearly a hash map. If they want a tree map, then we have RedBlackTree
(though we should probably provide a wrapper that makes it easier to use
RedBlackTree as a map, since it's a bit unwieldy to do that at the moment). I
don't see the problem.
- Jonathan M Davis
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