container stuff

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 05/26/2010 04:44 AM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei A.:
>
>> I hope to work with ranges only.<
>
> Programming life is complex, you can't fit all of it in one schema
> ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds").
>
>
>> Will look into it, sounds like an implementation matter.<
>
> Yes, right. But to implement this idea the foreach() has to change a
> bit, to set the flag in nonrelease mode. If implemented this idea
> lessens a bit the need for the stable ("soft") methods.
>
>
>> Probably some trees could save some state if they exploit O(log n)
>> length.<
>
> In general a length can be O(n) if for example you want to compute it
> on a linked list that doesn't keep the number of items inserted. Are
> you going to just not give a length attribute for such linked lists
> (so users have to use something like walkLength)?

Correct, some collections (notably SList) will simply not provide length().

In fact I will implement SList soon as an illustration of the design.

Andrei