On 17/09/2010 17:44, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 9/17/10 10:48 CDT, Michel Fortin wrote:
In my mind it's simpler to just explain the notion that an uninitialized
hash is null and detached from anything else until initialized. Objects
works like this (minus the implicit initialization part), so it
shouldn't be too hard to understand. Better have pragmatic semantics
that work rather than idealistic semantics that fail at a number of
cases.
That's a fair point.
Andrei
And perhaps even better would be to have the
associative-arrays/hash-maps behave just like an object (and dynamic
arrays), instead of being a covert pseudo-reference type that gets
implicitly initialized. It is a more natural and consistent behavior.
The only claimed drawback is performance, but I'm having a hard time
understanding what use case motivates this: why do we want lazy
initialized hashmaps anyways? You only get a performance benefit in the
cases where you end up using the hashmap but not require it to be
initialized, and these cases seems fairly rare. I don't think they
justify the current behavior. Can someone give me a code sample or
scenario where hashmap lazy initialization would be better than the more
orthogonal object-like approach I mentioned above?
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
