Book in the works by Alexander Stepanov

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

See http://www.stepanovpapers.com/eop/eop.pdf for an interesting read. 
The school of thought put forth by Stepanov resolves the recent 
digitalmars.d debate on interface design (e.g. whether opIndex should be 
part of a list interface) by favoring designs that define primitive 
efficient operations from which others, potentially less efficient, can 
be derived. On pages 5-6:

"A computational basis for a type is a finite set of procedures that 
enable the construction of any other procedure on the type. A basis is 
efficient if and only if any procedure implemented using it is as 
efficient as an equivalent procedure written in terms of an alternative 
basis. For example, a basis for unsigned 32-bit integers providing only 
zero, equality, and the successor function is not efficient since the 
implementation of addition in terms of successor is linear."


Andrei