Hi, folks. After a year of computer science courses (yay for learning fundamentals), I've been thinking about arrays and their indexOf() method, and wondering: why don't we have an array type that sorts the items for us in JavaScript?
(By the way, I love the Map & Set implementations in Firefox. Very, very handy.) Because arrays in JS are assumed to be unsorted, indexOf is an O(n) operation. But if I have an array of values, and use a simple comparator function, indexOf becomes O(log n), plus whatever the invocation time is for the comparator. In the simplest cases, I'm sorting numbers or strings, which wouldn't need a fancy comparator function. If I'm sorting objects, I can write my comparator function just like I would for Array.sort. Many of the methods for manipulating arrays would go away (unshift, shift, push, pop, splice). There would also be a need to add .has(), .set(), .remove() methods, probably (like a Map). I'm sure I'm just repeating the obvious now, so I'm wondering if it would be worth adding to the language in some form. I'm well aware it would be easy to implement in JavaScript, but would a JS-based implementation be faster than a native one? -- "The first step in confirming there is a bug in someone else's work is confirming there are no bugs in your own." -- Alexander J. Vincent, June 30, 2001
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