What about putting array.empty in object.d?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 21, 2012 20:46:05 Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 21, 2012 20:17:06 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> > On Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:56:41 -0400, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>
> > 
> > wrote:
> > > Except that containers shouldn't provide indexing if it's not efficient.
> > > And
> > > from what I've seen, it's far too common for programmers to check length
> > > == 0,
> > > and they end up doing it on stuff like linked lists where it _is_
> > > inefficient.
> > 
> > Wait, if someone provides inefficient length, what makes you think they
> > won't provide inefficient indexing?
> 
> Both C++'s STL and D's std.container put requirements on the algorithmic
> complexity of various operations. O(n) indexing would violate them, whereas
> they allow O(n) length/size.

Actually, it looks like std.container _does_ guarantee that length is O(1), 
unlike C++'s STL, in which case it's not the same issue that it is in C++. I'd 
still tend to argue that checking for empty is better, but I guess that it's 
not as big a deal. In C++, it's a definite problem when programmers keep 
checking that size() == 0, since inevitably, it ends up happening with linked 
lists and the like, making for inefficient code, and simply being in the habit 
of using empty() rather than size() == 0 avoids such problems.

- Jonathan M Davis