Associative Ranges

[Freddy via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 15:46:31 UTC, Xinok wrote:
> On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 14:49:49 UTC, bearophile wrote:
>> Xinok:
>>
>>> I do wonder if we should generalize an interface for these 
>>> types of ranges.
>>
>> First of all you need some use cases and usage examples.
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> The most obvious use case is generic functions that can operate 
> on associative ranges of any type, regardless of 
> implementation. There are various ways to implement and 
> optimize hash tables for specific use cases, so it would be 
> convenient not to be restricted to a single container.
>
> As for usage examples, I don't have any because I'm not sure 
> what the primitives should be. I will emphasize that 
> "associative ranges" should be distinguishable from 
> random-access ranges. If they weren't, then we would have to 
> comb through Phobos and add checks everywhere, e.g. 
> (!isAssociativeRange!Range). I don't think forward ranges and 
> bidirectional ranges would be an issue though.
It might be a ploblem if you have an Associative Range where the
key is size_t unless Associative ranges are not Input/Forward
Ranges