On Wednesday, 27 February 2013 at 19:36:44 UTC, bearophile wrote:
But in some cases I'd like to merge different types of ranges, that I can't put in an array. Is this use case worth supporting (usually the number of ranges is small so for such use cases a heap is not so needed)?
I'm not sure how common the use case is, but I think it'd be fairly easy to support.
Just internally have an array of indices to the tuple and use the heap with a less defined like "myTup[a] < myTup[b]" to use the indices to look into the tuple to sort the indices appropriately. Just add some compile-time checks to make sure all of the ElementTypes of the tuple agree and it's essentially the same thing as already implemented.
It actually probably wouldn't be a terrible idea to write a wrapper range that does this type of process so that it may be used with anything and the wrapper range could be a RandomAccessRange... this would (probably) make it possible to use tuples in a lot of places it isn't exactly allowed right now.
