On 3 Jul 2005, at 19:09, James Black wrote:
Scott Lamb wrote:
I still do not understand. Why can't I serialize a List with exactly
the same XML representation as an array? And deserialize it back to a
List? Why does the other side have to know anything about this?
A list has other attributes besides an array, as it has to know
something about order and relationships between items.
This is nonsense. I don't know the intricacies of SOAP or Axis, but I
know what arrays and lists are.
A list is an ordered collection of items.
An array is an indexed collection of items. Indexed implies ordered.
Thus, an array is a specialization of list. (In Java, there is an
ArrayList class. A list represented in memory by an array. It
supports the exact same operations as LinkedList; the only difference
is the complexity of some operations. I.e., get(int n) is O(1)
instead of O(n).)
Their serialization is the same; you'd write an array in order of
ascending indexes.
--
Scott Lamb <http://www.slamb.org/>
