On Friday, 4 December 2015 at 03:37:10 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 12/3/15 10:29 PM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
On Friday, 4 December 2015 at 02:21:12 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/03/2015 09:10 PM, Idan Arye wrote:
The complexities of the operations is a property of the data
structure
being used. If each collection type will have it's own set
of method
names based on the complexity of operations on it, we won't
be able to
have templated functions that operate on any kind of
collection(or at
the very least, these functions will be really tedious to
code).
Your premise is right but you reach the negation of the
correct
conclusion. -- Andrei
How so? If a singly linked list and a doubly linked list have
two
different method names for the same operation, then they
cannot be
easily templated.
Took me a while to figure. There's a hierarchy of operations,
e.g. if a collection implements insert, it automatically
implements linearInsert. And so on. The collections framework
provides these defaults, so client code that needs quick insert
uses insert, whereas code that's fine with a linear upper bound
uses linearInsert and captures both.
"I just want to insert an element. I don't care how long it
takes. Why do I need to specify that it should be linear?"
In my opinion, there should be "constantInsert", "linearInsert",
etc. for those who care about the complexity, and "insert" should
be always available.
