Michel Fortin wrote:
On 2011-08-02 13:15:52 +0000, bearophile <[email protected]> said:
A tuple isn't an object, it's more like a record, it's almost like a
more handy POD. So tuples are data structures that you use with code
(functions) that they don't contain.
Actually, that's up to debate in my opinion. Andrei's Tuple in phobos is
a struct, so it's a POD like you say. Walter's tuples in the language
are just collections of variables.
In fact they're collections of symbols, which can be types, variables,
or values...
A language tuple does not have an address in itself, it essentially has
one address per field. This actually makes tuple packing/unpacking very
efficient across function calls (because there's no real
packing/unpacking taking place), but it makes it impossible to take the
address of a tuple.
We need a way to make those two concepts work together, I think that's
the hard part.
Tuples do have some disadvantages. Their fields often are anonymous,
this goes against the typical well defined style of D/Java/Ada
programs, where you know the name of what you are using. So tuples are
better if you use them locally, or if they have only few items. Long
tuples become hard to use because you risk forgetting what each field
is, so the most common tuples have between 2 and 5 items.
Named tuple elements in a language tuple will be implemented when/if
someone implement named arguments, something I might do eventually.
